On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 3:55 PM Andrew Morton <akpm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > On Fri, 13 Nov 2020 09:34:48 -0800 Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > When a process is being killed it might be in an uninterruptible sleep > > which leads to an unpredictable delay in its memory reclaim. In low memory > > situations, when it's important to free up memory quickly, such delay is > > problematic. Kernel solves this problem with oom-reaper thread which > > performs memory reclaim even when the victim process is not runnable. > > Userspace currently lacks such mechanisms and the need and potential > > solutions were discussed before (see links below). > > This patch provides a mechanism to perform memory reclaim in the context > > of the process that sends SIGKILL signal. New SYNC_REAP_MM flag for > > pidfd_send_signal syscall can be used only when sending SIGKILL signal > > and will lead to the caller synchronously reclaiming the memory that > > belongs to the victim and can be easily reclaimed. > > hm. > > Seems to me that the ability to reap another process's memory is a > generally useful one, and that it should not be tied to delivering a > signal in this fashion. > > And we do have the new process_madvise(MADV_PAGEOUT). It may need a > few changes and tweaks, but can't that be used to solve this problem? Thank you for the feedback, Andrew. process_madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) was one of the options recently discussed in https://lore.kernel.org/linux-api/CAJuCfpGz1kPM3G1gZH+09Z7aoWKg05QSAMMisJ7H5MdmRrRhNQ@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx . The thread describes some of the issues with that approach but if we limit it to processes with pending SIGKILL only then I think that would be doable.
