On Wed, 14 Aug 2019 22:20:24 +0200 Daniel Vetter <daniel.vetter@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > In some special cases we must not block, but there's not a > spinlock, preempt-off, irqs-off or similar critical section already > that arms the might_sleep() debug checks. Add a non_block_start/end() > pair to annotate these. > > This will be used in the oom paths of mmu-notifiers, where blocking is > not allowed to make sure there's forward progress. Quoting Michal: > > "The notifier is called from quite a restricted context - oom_reaper - > which shouldn't depend on any locks or sleepable conditionals. The code > should be swift as well but we mostly do care about it to make a forward > progress. Checking for sleepable context is the best thing we could come > up with that would describe these demands at least partially." > > Peter also asked whether we want to catch spinlocks on top, but Michal > said those are less of a problem because spinlocks can't have an > indirect dependency upon the page allocator and hence close the loop > with the oom reaper. I continue to struggle with this. It introduces a new kernel state "running preemptibly but must not call schedule()". How does this make any sense? Perhaps a much, much more detailed description of the oom_reaper situation would help out.
