4.8-stable review patch. If anyone has any objections, please let me know. ------------------ From: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> 31e49bfda184 ("mm, oom: protect !costly allocations some more for !CONFIG_COMPACTION") was an attempt to reduce chances of pre-mature OOM killer invocation for high order requests. It seemed to work for most users just fine but it is far from bullet proof and obviously not sufficient for Marc who has reported pre-mature OOM killer invocations with 4.8 based kernels. 4.9 will all the compaction improvements seems to be behaving much better but that would be too intrusive to backport to 4.8 stable kernels. Instead this patch simply never declares OOM for !costly high order requests. We rely on order-0 requests to do that in case we are really out of memory. Order-0 requests are much more common and so a risk of a livelock without any way forward is highly unlikely. Reported-by: Marc MERLIN <marc@xxxxxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Marc MERLIN <marc@xxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@xxxxxxxx> --- mm/page_alloc.c | 10 ++++++++++ 1 file changed, 10 insertions(+) --- a/mm/page_alloc.c +++ b/mm/page_alloc.c @@ -3161,6 +3161,16 @@ should_compact_retry(struct alloc_contex if (!order || order > PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER) return false; +#ifdef CONFIG_COMPACTION + /* + * This is a gross workaround to compensate a lack of reliable compaction + * operation. We cannot simply go OOM with the current state of the compaction + * code because this can lead to pre mature OOM declaration. + */ + if (order <= PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER) + return true; +#endif + /* * There are setups with compaction disabled which would prefer to loop * inside the allocator rather than hit the oom killer prematurely. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html