How to handle TIF_MEMDIE stalls?

[Michal Hocko]

On Fri 20-02-15 08:43:56, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 01:29:14PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:
> > On Thu 19-02-15 06:01:24, Johannes Weiner wrote:
> > [...]
> > > Preferrably, we'd get rid of all nofail allocations and replace them
> > > with preallocated reserves.  But this is not going to happen anytime
> > > soon, so what other option do we have than resolving this on the OOM
> > > killer side?
> > 
> > As I've mentioned in other email, we might give GFP_NOFAIL allocator
> > access to memory reserves (by giving it __GFP_HIGH).
> 
> Won't work when you have thousands of concurrent transactions
> running in XFS and they are all doing GFP_NOFAIL allocations.

Is there any bound on how many transactions can run at the same time?

> That's why I suggested the per-transaction reserve pool - we can use
> that

I am still not sure what you mean by reserve pool (API wise). How
does it differ from pre-allocating memory before the "may not fail
context"? Could you elaborate on it, please?

> to throttle the number of concurent contexts demanding memory for
> forwards progress, just the same was we throttle the number of
> concurrent processes based on maximum log space requirements of the
> transactions and the amount of unreserved log space available.
> 
> No log space, transaction reservations waits on an ordered queue for
> space to become available. No memory available, transaction
> reservation waits on an ordered queue for memory to become
> available.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Dave.
> -- 
> Dave Chinner
> david at fromorbit.com

-- 
Michal Hocko
SUSE Labs