Memory controller implements the memory.low best-effort memory
protection mechanism, which works perfectly in many cases and allows
protecting working sets of important workloads from sudden reclaim.
But its semantics has a significant limitation: it works only as long as
there is a supply of reclaimable memory. This makes it pretty useless
against any sort of slow memory leaks or memory usage increases. This
is especially true for swapless systems. If swap is enabled, memory
soft protection effectively postpones problems, allowing a leaking
application to fill all swap area, which makes no sense. The only
effective way to guarantee the memory protection in this case is to
invoke the OOM killer.
It's possible to handle this case in userspace by reacting on MEMCG_LOW
events; but there is still a place for a fail-safe in-kernel mechanism
to provide stronger guarantees.
This patch introduces the memory.min interface for cgroup v2 memory
controller. It works very similarly to memory.low (sharing the same
hierarchical behavior), except that it's not disabled if there is no
more reclaimable memory in the system.
If cgroup is not populated, its memory.min is ignored, because otherwise
even the OOM killer wouldn't be able to reclaim the protected memory,
and the system can stall.
[guro@fb.com: s/low/min/ in docs]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180510130758.GA9129@castle.DHCP.thefacebook.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180509180734.GA4856@castle.DHCP.thefacebook.com
Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
bf8d5d52ff
