On Wed, 5 Jun 2013, Michal Hocko wrote: > > For the aforementioned reason that we give users the ability to manipulate > > their own memcg trees and userspace is untrusted. Their oom notifiers > > cannot be run as root, not only because of security but also because it > > would not properly isolate their memory usage to their memcg tree. > > Yes, but nothing prevents an admin - I hope you trust at least this > entity - to do the global watchdog for the fallback mode. So users can > play as they like but if they are not able to cope with the oom > situation for the defined timeout then the global (trusted and running > in the root memcg) watchdog re-enables in-kernel oom handler. > Users have the full ability to manipulate their own memcg hierarchy under the root, the global entity that schedules these jobs is not aware of any user subcontainers that are created beneath the user root. These user subcontainers may be oom and our desire is for the user to be able to have their own userspace handling implementation at a higher level (or with memcg memory reserves). Userspace is untrusted, they can't be expected to register an oom notifier for a child memcg with a global resource, they may not care that they deadlock and leave behind gigabytes of memory that can't be freed if they oom. And, if that userspace global resource dies or becomes unresponsive itself for whatever reason, all oom memcgs deadlock. > > I don't think you yet understand the problem, which is probably my fault. > > I'm not insisting this be implemented in the kernel, I'm saying it's not > > possible to do it in userspace. > > Because you still insist on having this fallback mode running inside > untrusted environment AFAIU. > -ENOPARSE. The failsafe is the kernel, it ensures that memcgs don't sit completely deadlocked for days and weeks and take up resources that can never be freed. The entire purpose of userspace oom notification is so that users can implement their own policy, whatever is implemented in the kernel may not apply (they may want to kill the largest process, the newest, the youngest, one on a priority-based scale, etc). > > This is the result of memcg allowing users to disable the oom killer > > entirely for a memcg, which is still ridiculous, because if the user > > doesn't respond then you've wasted all that memory and cannot get it back > > without admin intervention or a reboot. There are no other "features" in > > the kernel that put such a responsibility on a userspace process such that > > if it doesn't work then the entire memcg deadlocks forever without admin > > intervention. We need a failsafe in the kernel. > > But the memcg would deadlock within constrains assigned from somebody > trusted. So while the memory is basically wasted the limit assignment > already says that somebody (trusted) dedicated that much of memory. So I > think disabling oom for ever is not that ridiculous. > I don't understand what you're trying to say. Yes, a trusted resource sets the user root's limits and that is their allotted use. To implement a sane userspace oom handler, we need to give it time to respond; my solution is memory.oom_delay_millisecs, your solution is disabling the oom killer for that memcg. Anything else results in an instant oom kill from the kernel. If the user has their own implementation, with today's kernel it is required to disable the oom killer entirely and nothing in that untrusted environment is ever guaranteed to re-enable the oom killer or even have the memory to do so if it wanted. Meanwhile, the trusted resource has no knowledge whatsoever of these user subcontainers and it can't infinitely scan the memcg tree to find them because that requires memory that may not be available because of global oom or because of slab accounting. -- 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>