On 06/30/2012 05:06 AM, David Rientjes wrote:
The global oom killer is serialized by the zonelist being used in the page allocation. Concurrent oom kills are thus a rare event and only occur in systems using mempolicies and with a large number of nodes. Memory controller oom kills, however, can frequently be concurrent since there is no serialization once the oom killer is called for oom conditions in several different memcgs in parallel. This creates a massive contention on tasklist_lock since the oom killer requires the readside for the tasklist iteration. If several memcgs are calling the oom killer, this lock can be held for a substantial amount of time, especially if threads continue to enter it as other threads are exiting. Since the exit path grabs the writeside of the lock with irqs disabled in a few different places, this can cause a soft lockup on cpus as a result of tasklist_lock starvation. The kernel lacks unfair writelocks, and successful calls to the oom killer usually result in at least one thread entering the exit path, so an alternative solution is needed. This patch introduces a seperate oom handler for memcgs so that they do not require tasklist_lock for as much time. Instead, it iterates only over the threads attached to the oom memcg and grabs a reference to the selected thread before calling oom_kill_process() to ensure it doesn't prematurely exit. This still requires tasklist_lock for the tasklist dump, iterating children of the selected process, and killing all other threads on the system sharing the same memory as the selected victim. So while this isn't a complete solution to tasklist_lock starvation, it significantly reduces the amount of time that it is held.
Looks good. You can add Reviewed-by: Sha Zhengju <handai.szj@xxxxxxxxxx> Thanks, Sha -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>