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  • Michal Hocko's avatar
    memcg, kmem: deprecate kmem.limit_in_bytes · 0158115f
    Michal Hocko authored
    Cgroup v1 memcg controller has exposed a dedicated kmem limit to users
    which turned out to be really a bad idea because there are paths which
    cannot shrink the kernel memory usage enough to get below the limit (e.g.
    because the accounted memory is not reclaimable).  There are cases when
    the failure is even not allowed (e.g.  __GFP_NOFAIL).  This means that the
    kmem limit is in excess to the hard limit without any way to shrink and
    thus completely useless.  OOM killer cannot be invoked to handle the
    situation because that would lead to a premature oom killing.
    
    As a result many places might see ENOMEM returning from kmalloc and result
    in unexpected errors.  E.g.  a global OOM killer when there is a lot of
    free memory because ENOMEM is translated into VM_FAULT_OOM in #PF path and
    therefore pagefault_out_of_memory would result in OOM killer.
    
    Please note that the kernel memory is still accounted to the overall limit
    along with the user memory so removing the kmem specific limit should
    still allow to contain kernel memory consumption.  Unlike the kmem one,
    though, it invokes memory reclaim and targeted memcg oom killing if
    necessary.
    
    Start the deprecation process by crying to the kernel log.  Let's see
    whether there are relevant usecases and simply return to EINVAL in the
    second stage if nobody complains in few releases.
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak documentation text]
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190911151612.GI4023@dhcp22.suse.cz
    
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarShakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
    Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>
    Cc: Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>
    Cc: Thomas Lindroth <thomas.lindroth@gmail.com>
    Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    0158115f