From 96c7a2ff21501691587e1ae969b83cbec8b78e08 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: "Eric W. Biederman" Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2014 14:25:41 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] fs/file.c:fdtable: avoid triggering OOMs from alloc_fdmem Recently due to a spike in connections per second memcached on 3 separate boxes triggered the OOM killer from accept. At the time the OOM killer was triggered there was 4GB out of 36GB free in zone 1. The problem was that alloc_fdtable was allocating an order 3 page (32KiB) to hold a bitmap, and there was sufficient fragmentation that the largest page available was 8KiB. I find the logic that PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER can't fail pretty dubious but I do agree that order 3 allocations are very likely to succeed. There are always pathologies where order > 0 allocations can fail when there are copious amounts of free memory available. Using the pigeon hole principle it is easy to show that it requires 1 page more than 50% of the pages being free to guarantee an order 1 (8KiB) allocation will succeed, 1 page more than 75% of the pages being free to guarantee an order 2 (16KiB) allocation will succeed and 1 page more than 87.5% of the pages being free to guarantee an order 3 allocate will succeed. A server churning memory with a lot of small requests and replies like memcached is a common case that if anything can will skew the odds against large pages being available. Therefore let's not give external applications a practical way to kill linux server applications, and specify __GFP_NORETRY to the kmalloc in alloc_fdmem. Unless I am misreading the code and by the time the code reaches should_alloc_retry in __alloc_pages_slowpath (where __GFP_NORETRY becomes signification). We have already tried everything reasonable to allocate a page and the only thing left to do is wait. So not waiting and falling back to vmalloc immediately seems like the reasonable thing to do even if there wasn't a chance of triggering the OOM killer. Signed-off-by: "Eric W. Biederman" Cc: Eric Dumazet Acked-by: David Rientjes Cc: Cong Wang Cc: Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- fs/file.c | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/fs/file.c b/fs/file.c index 771578b33fb6..db25c2bdfe46 100644 --- a/fs/file.c +++ b/fs/file.c @@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ static void *alloc_fdmem(size_t size) * vmalloc() if the allocation size will be considered "large" by the VM. */ if (size <= (PAGE_SIZE << PAGE_ALLOC_COSTLY_ORDER)) { - void *data = kmalloc(size, GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_NOWARN); + void *data = kmalloc(size, GFP_KERNEL|__GFP_NOWARN|__GFP_NORETRY); if (data != NULL) return data; }