On Tue 05-09-17 17:53:44, Johannes Weiner wrote: > On Tue, Sep 05, 2017 at 03:44:12PM +0200, Michal Hocko wrote: > > Why is this an opt out rather than opt-in? IMHO the original oom logic > > should be preserved by default and specific workloads should opt in for > > the cgroup aware logic. Changing the global behavior depending on > > whether cgroup v2 interface is in use is more than unexpected and IMHO > > wrong approach to take. I think we should instead go with > > oom_strategy=[alloc_task,biggest_task,cgroup] > > > > we currently have alloc_task (via sysctl_oom_kill_allocating_task) and > > biggest_task which is the default. You are adding cgroup and the more I > > think about the more I agree that it doesn't really make sense to try to > > fit thew new semantic into the existing one (compare tasks to kill-all > > memcgs). Just introduce a new strategy and define a new semantic from > > scratch. Memcg priority and kill-all are a natural extension of this new > > strategy. This will make the life easier and easier to understand by > > users. > > oom_kill_allocating_task is actually a really good example of why > cgroup-awareness *should* be the new default. > > Before we had the oom killer victim selection, we simply killed the > faulting/allocating task. While a valid answer to the problem, it's > not very fair or representative of what the user wants or intends. > > Then we added code to kill the biggest offender instead, which should > have been the case from the start and was hence made the new default. > The oom_kill_allocating_task was added on the off-chance that there > might be setups who, for historical reasons, rely on the old behavior. > But our default was chosen based on what behavior is fair, expected, > and most reflective of the user's intentions. I am not sure this is how things evolved actually. This is way before my time so my git log interpretation might be imprecise. We do have oom_badness heuristic since out_of_memory has been introduced and oom_kill_allocating_task has been introduced much later because of large boxes with zillions of tasks (SGI I suspect) which took too long to select a victim so David has added this heuristic. > The cgroup-awareness in the OOM killer is exactly the same thing. It > should have been the default from the beginning, because the user > configures a group of tasks to be an interdependent, terminal unit of > memory consumption, and it's undesirable for the OOM killer to ignore > this intention and compare members across these boundaries. I would agree if that was true in general. I can completely see how the cgroup awareness is useful in e.g. containerized environments (especially with kill-all enabled) but memcgs are used in a large variety of usecases and I cannot really say all of them really demand the new semantic. Say I have a workload which doesn't want to see reclaim interference from others on the same machine. Why should I kill a process from that particular memcg just because it is the largest one when there is a memory hog/leak outside of this memcg? >From my point of view the safest (in a sense of the least surprise) way to go with opt-in for the new heuristic. I am pretty sure all who would benefit from the new behavior will enable it while others will not regress in unexpected way. We can talk about the way _how_ to control these oom strategies, of course. But I would be really reluctant to change the default which is used for years and people got used to it. -- Michal Hocko SUSE Labs -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
