Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1161003AbWHRPGo (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:06:44 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1161004AbWHRPGo (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:06:44 -0400 Received: from e5.ny.us.ibm.com ([32.97.182.145]:33501 "EHLO e5.ny.us.ibm.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1161003AbWHRPGm (ORCPT ); Fri, 18 Aug 2006 11:06:42 -0400 Subject: Re: [ckrm-tech] [RFC][PATCH 5/7] UBC: kernel memory accounting (core) From: Dave Hansen To: Kirill Korotaev Cc: rohitseth@google.com, Rik van Riel , ckrm-tech@lists.sourceforge.net, Linux Kernel Mailing List , Andi Kleen , Christoph Hellwig , Andrey Savochkin , devel@openvz.org, hugh@veritas.com, Ingo Molnar , Alan Cox , Pavel Emelianov In-Reply-To: <44E588F0.40502@sw.ru> References: <44E33893.6020700@sw.ru> <44E33C8A.6030705@sw.ru> <1155752693.22595.76.camel@galaxy.corp.google.com> <44E46ED3.7000201@sw.ru> <1155825493.9274.42.camel@localhost.localdomain> <44E588F0.40502@sw.ru> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 08:06:22 -0700 Message-Id: <1155913582.9274.99.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.4.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2010 Lines: 46 On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 13:31 +0400, Kirill Korotaev wrote: > they all are troublesome :/ > user can create lots of vmas, w/o page tables. > lots of fdsets, ipcids. > These are not reclaimable. In the real world, with the customers to which you've given these patches, which of these objects is most likely to be consuming the most space? Is there one set of objects that we could work on that would fix _most_ of the cases which you have encountered? > Also consider the following scenario with reclaimable page tables. > e.g. user hit kmemsize limit due to fat page tables. > kernel reclaims some of the page tables and frees user kenerl memory. > after that user creates some uncreclaimable objects like fdsets or ipcs > and then accesses memory with reclaimed page tables. > Sooner or later we kill user with SIGSEGV from page fault due to > no memory. This is worse then returning ENOMEM from poll() or > mmap() where user allocates kernel objects. I think you're claiming that doing reclaim of kernel objects causes much more severe and less recoverable errors than does reclaiming of user pages. That might generally be true, but I have one example that's killing me. (You shouldn't have mentioned mmap ;) Let's say you have a memory area mapped by one pagetable page, and with 1 user page mapped in it. The system is out of memory, and if you reclaim either the pagetable page or the user page, you're never going to get it back. So, you pick the user page to reclaim. The user touches it, the memory allocation fails, and the process gets killed. Instead, you reclaim the pagetable page. The user touches their page, the memory allocation for the pagetable fails, and the process gets killed. Seems like the same end result to me. -- Dave - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/