Commit 7f33d49a authored Jun 16, 2009 by Rafael J. Wysocki Committed by Linus Torvalds Jun 16, 2009

mm, PM/Freezer: Disable OOM killer when tasks are frozen



Currently, the following scenario appears to be possible in theory:

* Tasks are frozen for hibernation or suspend.
* Free pages are almost exhausted.
* Certain piece of code in the suspend code path attempts to allocate
  some memory using GFP_KERNEL and allocation order less than or
  equal to PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER.
* __alloc_pages_internal() cannot find a free page so it invokes the
  OOM killer.
* The OOM killer attempts to kill a task, but the task is frozen, so
  it doesn't die immediately.
* __alloc_pages_internal() jumps to 'restart', unsuccessfully tries
  to find a free page and invokes the OOM killer.
* No progress can be made.

Although it is now hard to trigger during hibernation due to the memory
shrinking carried out by the hibernation code, it is theoretically
possible to trigger during suspend after the memory shrinking has been
removed from that code path.  Moreover, since memory allocations are
going to be used for the hibernation memory shrinking, it will be even
more likely to happen during hibernation.

To prevent it from happening, introduce the oom_killer_disabled switch
that will cause __alloc_pages_internal() to fail in the situations in
which the OOM killer would have been called and make the freezer set
this switch after tasks have been successfully frozen.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: be nicer to the namespace]
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>
Cc: Fengguang Wu <fengguang.wu@gmail.com>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Acked-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

parent 75927af8

include/linux/gfp.h

+12 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -243,4 +243,16 @@ void drain_zone_pages(struct zone zone, struct per_cpu_pages pcp);
		void drain_all_pages(void);
		void drain_local_pages(void *dummy);

		extern bool oom_killer_disabled;

		static inline void oom_killer_disable(void)
		{
		oom_killer_disabled = true;
		}

		static inline void oom_killer_enable(void)
		{
		oom_killer_disabled = false;
		}

		#endif /* __LINUX_GFP_H */

kernel/power/process.c

+5 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -117,9 +117,12 @@ int freeze_processes(void)
		if (error)
		goto Exit;
		printk("done.");

		oom_killer_disable();
		Exit:
		BUG_ON(in_atomic());
		printk("\n");

		return error;
		}

		@@ -145,6 +148,8 @@ static void thaw_tasks(bool nosig_only)

		void thaw_processes(void)
		{
		oom_killer_enable();

		printk("Restarting tasks ... ");
		thaw_tasks(true);
		thaw_tasks(false);

mm/page_alloc.c

+4 −0

Original line number	Diff line number	Diff line
		@@ -178,6 +178,8 @@ static void set_pageblock_migratetype(struct page *page, int migratetype)
		PB_migrate, PB_migrate_end);
		}

		bool oom_killer_disabled __read_mostly;

		#ifdef CONFIG_DEBUG_VM
		static int page_outside_zone_boundaries(struct zone zone, struct page page)
		{
		@@ -1769,6 +1771,8 @@ rebalance:
		*/
		if (!did_some_progress) {
		if ((gfp_mask & __GFP_FS) && !(gfp_mask & __GFP_NORETRY)) {
		if (oom_killer_disabled)
		goto nopage;
		page = __alloc_pages_may_oom(gfp_mask, order,
		zonelist, high_zoneidx,
		nodemask, preferred_zone,

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