On Wed, 4 Aug 2021 11:50:03 -0700 Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > In modern systems it's not unusual to have a system component monitoring > memory conditions of the system and tasked with keeping system memory > pressure under control. One way to accomplish that is to kill > non-essential processes to free up memory for more important ones. > Examples of this are Facebook's OOM killer daemon called oomd and > Android's low memory killer daemon called lmkd. > For such system component it's important to be able to free memory > quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately the time process takes to free > up its memory after receiving a SIGKILL might vary based on the state > of the process (uninterruptible sleep), size and OPP level of the core > the process is running. A mechanism to free resources of the target > process in a more predictable way would improve system's ability to > control its memory pressure. > Introduce process_mrelease system call that releases memory of a dying > process from the context of the caller. This way the memory is freed in > a more controllable way with CPU affinity and priority of the caller. > The workload of freeing the memory will also be charged to the caller. > The operation is allowed only on a dying process. > > After previous discussions [1, 2, 3] the decision was made [4] to introduce > a dedicated system call to cover this use case. > > The API is as follows, > > int process_mrelease(int pidfd, unsigned int flags); > > DESCRIPTION > The process_mrelease() system call is used to free the memory of > an exiting process. > > The pidfd selects the process referred to by the PID file > descriptor. > (See pidofd_open(2) for further information) I did s/pidofd_open/pidfd_open/ > > The flags argument is reserved for future use; currently, this > argument must be specified as 0. > > RETURN VALUE > On success, process_mrelease() returns 0. On error, -1 is > returned and errno is set to indicate the error. > > ERRORS > EBADF pidfd is not a valid PID file descriptor. > > EAGAIN Failed to release part of the address space. > > EINTR The call was interrupted by a signal; see signal(7). > > EINVAL flags is not 0. > > EINVAL The memory of the task cannot be released because the > process is not exiting, the address space is shared > with another live process or there is a core dump in > progress. > > ENOSYS This system call is not supported, for example, without > MMU support built into Linux. > > ESRCH The target process does not exist (i.e., it has terminated > and been waited on). > > ... > > mm/oom_kill.c | 65 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ > 1 file changed, 65 insertions(+) The code is nice and simple. Can we get a test suite into tools/testing/selftests?
