linux-stable.git/mm/memcontrol.c, branch v5.4

mm: memcg: switch to css_tryget() in get_mem_cgroup_from_mm()

2019-11-16T02:34:00+00:00

We've encountered a rcu stall in get_mem_cgroup_from_mm():

  rcu: INFO: rcu_sched self-detected stall on CPU
  rcu: 33-....: (21000 ticks this GP) idle=6c6/1/0x4000000000000002 softirq=35441/35441 fqs=5017
  (t=21031 jiffies g=324821 q=95837) NMI backtrace for cpu 33
  <...>
  RIP: 0010:get_mem_cgroup_from_mm+0x2f/0x90
  <...>
   __memcg_kmem_charge+0x55/0x140
   __alloc_pages_nodemask+0x267/0x320
   pipe_write+0x1ad/0x400
   new_sync_write+0x127/0x1c0
   __kernel_write+0x4f/0xf0
   dump_emit+0x91/0xc0
   writenote+0xa0/0xc0
   elf_core_dump+0x11af/0x1430
   do_coredump+0xc65/0xee0
   get_signal+0x132/0x7c0
   do_signal+0x36/0x640
   exit_to_usermode_loop+0x61/0xd0
   do_syscall_64+0xd4/0x100
   entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9

The problem is caused by an exiting task which is associated with an
offline memcg.  We're iterating over and over in the do {} while
(!css_tryget_online()) loop, but obviously the memcg won't become online
and the exiting task won't be migrated to a live memcg.

Let's fix it by switching from css_tryget_online() to css_tryget().

As css_tryget_online() cannot guarantee that the memcg won't go offline,
the check is usually useless, except some rare cases when for example it
determines if something should be presented to a user.

A similar problem is described by commit 18fa84a2db0e ("cgroup: Use
css_tryget() instead of css_tryget_online() in task_get_css()").

Johannes:

: The bug aside, it doesn't matter whether the cgroup is online for the
: callers.  It used to matter when offlining needed to evacuate all charges
: from the memcg, and so needed to prevent new ones from showing up, but we
: don't care now.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191106225131.3543616-1-guro@fb.com
Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Acked-by: Tejun Heo 
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Michal Koutn 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: memcontrol: fix network errors from failing __GFP_ATOMIC charges

2019-11-06T16:47:50+00:00

While upgrading from 4.16 to 5.2, we noticed these allocation errors in
the log of the new kernel:

  SLUB: Unable to allocate memory on node -1, gfp=0xa20(GFP_ATOMIC)
    cache: tw_sock_TCPv6(960:helper-logs), object size: 232, buffer size: 240, default order: 1, min order: 0
    node 0: slabs: 5, objs: 170, free: 0

        slab_out_of_memory+1
        ___slab_alloc+969
        __slab_alloc+14
        kmem_cache_alloc+346
        inet_twsk_alloc+60
        tcp_time_wait+46
        tcp_fin+206
        tcp_data_queue+2034
        tcp_rcv_state_process+784
        tcp_v6_do_rcv+405
        __release_sock+118
        tcp_close+385
        inet_release+46
        __sock_release+55
        sock_close+17
        __fput+170
        task_work_run+127
        exit_to_usermode_loop+191
        do_syscall_64+212
        entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+68

accompanied by an increase in machines going completely radio silent
under memory pressure.

One thing that changed since 4.16 is e699e2c6a654 ("net, mm: account
sock objects to kmemcg"), which made these slab caches subject to cgroup
memory accounting and control.

The problem with that is that cgroups, unlike the page allocator, do not
maintain dedicated atomic reserves.  As a cgroup's usage hovers at its
limit, atomic allocations - such as done during network rx - can fail
consistently for extended periods of time.  The kernel is not able to
operate under these conditions.

We don't want to revert the culprit patch, because it indeed tracks a
potentially substantial amount of memory used by a cgroup.

We also don't want to implement dedicated atomic reserves for cgroups.
There is no point in keeping a fixed margin of unused bytes in the
cgroup's memory budget to accomodate a consumer that is impossible to
predict - we'd be wasting memory and get into configuration headaches,
not unlike what we have going with min_free_kbytes.  We do this for
physical mem because we have to, but cgroups are an accounting game.

Instead, account these privileged allocations to the cgroup, but let
them bypass the configured limit if they have to.  This way, we get the
benefits of accounting the consumed memory and have it exert pressure on
the rest of the cgroup, but like with the page allocator, we shift the
burden of reclaimining on behalf of atomic allocations onto the regular
allocations that can block.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191022233708.365764-1-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Fixes: e699e2c6a654 ("net, mm: account sock objects to kmemcg")
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt 
Cc: Suleiman Souhlal 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: 	[4.18+]
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: slab: make page_cgroup_ino() to recognize non-compound slab pages properly

2019-11-06T16:47:50+00:00

page_cgroup_ino() doesn't return a valid memcg pointer for non-compound
slab pages, because it depends on PgHead AND PgSlab flags to be set to
determine the memory cgroup from the kmem_cache.  It's correct for
compound pages, but not for generic small pages.  Those don't have PgHead
set, so it ends up returning zero.

Fix this by replacing the condition to PageSlab() && !PageTail().

Before this patch:
  [root@localhost ~]# ./page-types -c /sys/fs/cgroup/user.slice/user-0.slice/user@0.service/ | grep slab
  0x0000000000000080	        38        0  _______S___________________________________	slab

After this patch:
  [root@localhost ~]# ./page-types -c /sys/fs/cgroup/user.slice/user-0.slice/user@0.service/ | grep slab
  0x0000000000000080	       147        0  _______S___________________________________	slab

Also, hwpoison_filter_task() uses output of page_cgroup_ino() in order
to filter error injection events based on memcg.  So if
page_cgroup_ino() fails to return memcg pointer, we just fail to inject
memory error.  Considering that hwpoison filter is for testing, affected
users are limited and the impact should be marginal.

[n-horiguchi@ah.jp.nec.com: changelog additions]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191031012151.2722280-1-guro@fb.com
Fixes: 4d96ba353075 ("mm: memcg/slab: stop setting page->mem_cgroup pointer for slab pages")
Signed-off-by: Roman Gushchin 
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt 
Acked-by: David Rientjes 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Cc: Daniel Jordan 
Cc: Naoya Horiguchi 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: memcontrol: fix NULL-ptr deref in percpu stats flush

2019-11-06T16:28:58+00:00

__mem_cgroup_free() can be called on the failure path in
mem_cgroup_alloc().  However memcg_flush_percpu_vmstats() and
memcg_flush_percpu_vmevents() which are called from __mem_cgroup_free()
access the fields of memcg which can potentially be null if called from
failure path from mem_cgroup_alloc().  Indeed syzbot has reported the
following crash:

	kasan: CONFIG_KASAN_INLINE enabled
	kasan: GPF could be caused by NULL-ptr deref or user memory access
	general protection fault: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP KASAN
	CPU: 0 PID: 30393 Comm: syz-executor.1 Not tainted 5.4.0-rc2+ #0
	Hardware name: Google Google Compute Engine/Google Compute Engine, BIOS Google 01/01/2011
	RIP: 0010:memcg_flush_percpu_vmstats+0x4ae/0x930 mm/memcontrol.c:3436
	Code: 05 41 89 c0 41 0f b6 04 24 41 38 c7 7c 08 84 c0 0f 85 5d 03 00 00 44 3b 05 33 d5 12 08 0f 83 e2 00 00 00 4c 89 f0 48 c1 e8 03 <42> 80 3c 28 00 0f 85 91 03 00 00 48 8b 85 10 fe ff ff 48 8b b0 90
	RSP: 0018:ffff888095c27980 EFLAGS: 00010206
	RAX: 0000000000000012 RBX: ffff888095c27b28 RCX: ffffc90008192000
	RDX: 0000000000040000 RSI: ffffffff8340fae7 RDI: 0000000000000007
	RBP: ffff888095c27be0 R08: 0000000000000000 R09: ffffed1013f0da33
	R10: ffffed1013f0da32 R11: ffff88809f86d197 R12: fffffbfff138b760
	R13: dffffc0000000000 R14: 0000000000000090 R15: 0000000000000007
	FS:  00007f5027170700(0000) GS:ffff8880ae800000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
	CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
	CR2: 0000000000710158 CR3: 00000000a7b18000 CR4: 00000000001406f0
	DR0: 0000000000000000 DR1: 0000000000000000 DR2: 0000000000000000
	DR3: 0000000000000000 DR6: 00000000fffe0ff0 DR7: 0000000000000400
	Call Trace:
	__mem_cgroup_free+0x1a/0x190 mm/memcontrol.c:5021
	mem_cgroup_free mm/memcontrol.c:5033 [inline]
	mem_cgroup_css_alloc+0x3a1/0x1ae0 mm/memcontrol.c:5160
	css_create kernel/cgroup/cgroup.c:5156 [inline]
	cgroup_apply_control_enable+0x44d/0xc40 kernel/cgroup/cgroup.c:3119
	cgroup_mkdir+0x899/0x11b0 kernel/cgroup/cgroup.c:5401
	kernfs_iop_mkdir+0x14d/0x1d0 fs/kernfs/dir.c:1124
	vfs_mkdir+0x42e/0x670 fs/namei.c:3807
	do_mkdirat+0x234/0x2a0 fs/namei.c:3830
	__do_sys_mkdir fs/namei.c:3846 [inline]
	__se_sys_mkdir fs/namei.c:3844 [inline]
	__x64_sys_mkdir+0x5c/0x80 fs/namei.c:3844
	do_syscall_64+0xfa/0x760 arch/x86/entry/common.c:290
	entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x49/0xbe

Fixing this by moving the flush to mem_cgroup_free as there is no need
to flush anything if we see failure in mem_cgroup_alloc().

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20191018165231.249872-1-shakeelb@google.com
Fixes: bb65f89b7d3d ("mm: memcontrol: flush percpu vmevents before releasing memcg")
Fixes: c350a99ea2b1 ("mm: memcontrol: flush percpu vmstats before releasing memcg")
Signed-off-by: Shakeel Butt 
Reported-by: syzbot+515d5bcfe179cdf049b2@syzkaller.appspotmail.com
Reviewed-by: Roman Gushchin 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm/memcontrol: update lruvec counters in mem_cgroup_move_account

2019-10-19T10:32:32+00:00

Mapped, dirty and writeback pages are also counted in per-lruvec stats.
These counters needs update when page is moved between cgroups.

Currently is nobody *consuming* the lruvec versions of these counters and
that there is no user-visible effect.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/157112699975.7360.1062614888388489788.stgit@buzz
Fixes: 00f3ca2c2d66 ("mm: memcontrol: per-lruvec stats infrastructure")
Signed-off-by: Konstantin Khlebnikov 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Acked-by: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm, memcg: proportional memory.{low,min} reclaim

2019-10-07T22:47:20+00:00

cgroup v2 introduces two memory protection thresholds: memory.low
(best-effort) and memory.min (hard protection).  While they generally do
what they say on the tin, there is a limitation in their implementation
that makes them difficult to use effectively: that cliff behaviour often
manifests when they become eligible for reclaim.  This patch implements
more intuitive and usable behaviour, where we gradually mount more
reclaim pressure as cgroups further and further exceed their protection
thresholds.

This cliff edge behaviour happens because we only choose whether or not
to reclaim based on whether the memcg is within its protection limits
(see the use of mem_cgroup_protected in shrink_node), but we don't vary
our reclaim behaviour based on this information.  Imagine the following
timeline, with the numbers the lruvec size in this zone:

1. memory.low=1000000, memory.current=999999. 0 pages may be scanned.
2. memory.low=1000000, memory.current=1000000. 0 pages may be scanned.
3. memory.low=1000000, memory.current=1000001. 1000001* pages may be
   scanned. (?!)

* Of course, we won't usually scan all available pages in the zone even
  without this patch because of scan control priority, over-reclaim
  protection, etc.  However, as shown by the tests at the end, these
  techniques don't sufficiently throttle such an extreme change in input,
  so cliff-like behaviour isn't really averted by their existence alone.

Here's an example of how this plays out in practice.  At Facebook, we are
trying to protect various workloads from "system" software, like
configuration management tools, metric collectors, etc (see this[0] case
study).  In order to find a suitable memory.low value, we start by
determining the expected memory range within which the workload will be
comfortable operating.  This isn't an exact science -- memory usage deemed
"comfortable" will vary over time due to user behaviour, differences in
composition of work, etc, etc.  As such we need to ballpark memory.low,
but doing this is currently problematic:

1. If we end up setting it too low for the workload, it won't have
   *any* effect (see discussion above).  The group will receive the full
   weight of reclaim and won't have any priority while competing with the
   less important system software, as if we had no memory.low configured
   at all.

2. Because of this behaviour, we end up erring on the side of setting
   it too high, such that the comfort range is reliably covered.  However,
   protected memory is completely unavailable to the rest of the system,
   so we might cause undue memory and IO pressure there when we *know* we
   have some elasticity in the workload.

3. Even if we get the value totally right, smack in the middle of the
   comfort zone, we get extreme jumps between no pressure and full
   pressure that cause unpredictable pressure spikes in the workload due
   to the current binary reclaim behaviour.

With this patch, we can set it to our ballpark estimation without too much
worry.  Any undesirable behaviour, such as too much or too little reclaim
pressure on the workload or system will be proportional to how far our
estimation is off.  This means we can set memory.low much more
conservatively and thus waste less resources *without* the risk of the
workload falling off a cliff if we overshoot.

As a more abstract technical description, this unintuitive behaviour
results in having to give high-priority workloads a large protection
buffer on top of their expected usage to function reliably, as otherwise
we have abrupt periods of dramatically increased memory pressure which
hamper performance.  Having to set these thresholds so high wastes
resources and generally works against the principle of work conservation.
In addition, having proportional memory reclaim behaviour has other
benefits.  Most notably, before this patch it's basically mandatory to set
memory.low to a higher than desirable value because otherwise as soon as
you exceed memory.low, all protection is lost, and all pages are eligible
to scan again.  By contrast, having a gradual ramp in reclaim pressure
means that you now still get some protection when thresholds are exceeded,
which means that one can now be more comfortable setting memory.low to
lower values without worrying that all protection will be lost.  This is
important because workingset size is really hard to know exactly,
especially with variable workloads, so at least getting *some* protection
if your workingset size grows larger than you expect increases user
confidence in setting memory.low without a huge buffer on top being
needed.

Thanks a lot to Johannes Weiner and Tejun Heo for their advice and
assistance in thinking about how to make this work better.

In testing these changes, I intended to verify that:

1. Changes in page scanning become gradual and proportional instead of
   binary.

   To test this, I experimented stepping further and further down
   memory.low protection on a workload that floats around 19G workingset
   when under memory.low protection, watching page scan rates for the
   workload cgroup:

   +------------+-----------------+--------------------+--------------+
   | memory.low | test (pgscan/s) | control (pgscan/s) | % of control |
   +------------+-----------------+--------------------+--------------+
   |        21G |               0 |                  0 | N/A          |
   |        17G |             867 |               3799 | 23%          |
   |        12G |            1203 |               3543 | 34%          |
   |         8G |            2534 |               3979 | 64%          |
   |         4G |            3980 |               4147 | 96%          |
   |          0 |            3799 |               3980 | 95%          |
   +------------+-----------------+--------------------+--------------+

   As you can see, the test kernel (with a kernel containing this
   patch) ramps up page scanning significantly more gradually than the
   control kernel (without this patch).

2. More gradual ramp up in reclaim aggression doesn't result in
   premature OOMs.

   To test this, I wrote a script that slowly increments the number of
   pages held by stress(1)'s --vm-keep mode until a production system
   entered severe overall memory contention.  This script runs in a highly
   protected slice taking up the majority of available system memory.
   Watching vmstat revealed that page scanning continued essentially
   nominally between test and control, without causing forward reclaim
   progress to become arrested.

[0]: https://facebookmicrosites.github.io/cgroup2/docs/overview.html#case-study-the-fbtax2-project

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: reflow block comments to fit in 80 cols]
[chris@chrisdown.name: handle cgroup_disable=memory when getting memcg protection]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190201045711.GA18302@chrisdown.name
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190124014455.GA6396@chrisdown.name
Signed-off-by: Chris Down 
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner 
Reviewed-by: Roman Gushchin 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: Tejun Heo 
Cc: Dennis Zhou 
Cc: Tetsuo Handa 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg, kmem: do not fail __GFP_NOFAIL charges

2019-09-26T00:51:39+00:00

Thomas has noticed the following NULL ptr dereference when using cgroup
v1 kmem limit:
BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at 0000000000000008
PGD 0
P4D 0
Oops: 0000 [#1] PREEMPT SMP PTI
CPU: 3 PID: 16923 Comm: gtk-update-icon Not tainted 4.19.51 #42
Hardware name: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z97X-Gaming G1/Z97X-Gaming G1, BIOS F9 07/31/2015
RIP: 0010:create_empty_buffers+0x24/0x100
Code: cd 0f 1f 44 00 00 0f 1f 44 00 00 41 54 49 89 d4 ba 01 00 00 00 55 53 48 89 fb e8 97 fe ff ff 48 89 c5 48 89 c2 eb 03 48 89 ca <48> 8b 4a 08 4c 09 22 48 85 c9 75 f1 48 89 6a 08 48 8b 43 18 48 8d
RSP: 0018:ffff927ac1b37bf8 EFLAGS: 00010286
RAX: 0000000000000000 RBX: fffff2d4429fd740 RCX: 0000000100097149
RDX: 0000000000000000 RSI: 0000000000000082 RDI: ffff9075a99fbe00
RBP: 0000000000000000 R08: fffff2d440949cc8 R09: 00000000000960c0
R10: 0000000000000002 R11: 0000000000000000 R12: 0000000000000000
R13: ffff907601f18360 R14: 0000000000002000 R15: 0000000000001000
FS:  00007fb55b288bc0(0000) GS:ffff90761f8c0000(0000) knlGS:0000000000000000
CS:  0010 DS: 0000 ES: 0000 CR0: 0000000080050033
CR2: 0000000000000008 CR3: 000000007aebc002 CR4: 00000000001606e0
Call Trace:
 create_page_buffers+0x4d/0x60
 __block_write_begin_int+0x8e/0x5a0
 ? ext4_inode_attach_jinode.part.82+0xb0/0xb0
 ? jbd2__journal_start+0xd7/0x1f0
 ext4_da_write_begin+0x112/0x3d0
 generic_perform_write+0xf1/0x1b0
 ? file_update_time+0x70/0x140
 __generic_file_write_iter+0x141/0x1a0
 ext4_file_write_iter+0xef/0x3b0
 __vfs_write+0x17e/0x1e0
 vfs_write+0xa5/0x1a0
 ksys_write+0x57/0xd0
 do_syscall_64+0x55/0x160
 entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe+0x44/0xa9

Tetsuo then noticed that this is because the __memcg_kmem_charge_memcg
fails __GFP_NOFAIL charge when the kmem limit is reached.  This is a wrong
behavior because nofail allocations are not allowed to fail.  Normal
charge path simply forces the charge even if that means to cross the
limit.  Kmem accounting should be doing the same.

Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20190906125608.32129-1-mhocko@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko 
Reported-by: Thomas Lindroth 
Debugged-by: Tetsuo Handa 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin 
Cc: Thomas Lindroth 
Cc: Shakeel Butt 
Cc: 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: thp: make deferred split shrinker memcg aware

2019-09-24T22:54:11+00:00

Currently THP deferred split shrinker is not memcg aware, this may cause
premature OOM with some configuration.  For example the below test would
run into premature OOM easily:

$ cgcreate -g memory:thp
$ echo 4G > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/thp/memory/limit_in_bytes
$ cgexec -g memory:thp transhuge-stress 4000

transhuge-stress comes from kernel selftest.

It is easy to hit OOM, but there are still a lot THP on the deferred split
queue, memcg direct reclaim can't touch them since the deferred split
shrinker is not memcg aware.

Convert deferred split shrinker memcg aware by introducing per memcg
deferred split queue.  The THP should be on either per node or per memcg
deferred split queue if it belongs to a memcg.  When the page is
immigrated to the other memcg, it will be immigrated to the target memcg's
deferred split queue too.

Reuse the second tail page's deferred_list for per memcg list since the
same THP can't be on multiple deferred split queues.

[yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com: simplify deferred split queue dereference per Kirill Tkhai]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1566496227-84952-5-git-send-email-yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1565144277-36240-5-git-send-email-yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com
Signed-off-by: Yang Shi 
Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov 
Reviewed-by: Kirill Tkhai 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: "Kirill A . Shutemov" 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: Shakeel Butt 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Qian Cai 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

mm: shrinker: make shrinker not depend on memcg kmem

2019-09-24T22:54:11+00:00

Currently shrinker is just allocated and can work when memcg kmem is
enabled.  But, THP deferred split shrinker is not slab shrinker, it
doesn't make too much sense to have such shrinker depend on memcg kmem.
It should be able to reclaim THP even though memcg kmem is disabled.

Introduce a new shrinker flag, SHRINKER_NONSLAB, for non-slab shrinker.
When memcg kmem is disabled, just such shrinkers can be called in
shrinking memcg slab.

[yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com: add comment]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1566496227-84952-4-git-send-email-yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1565144277-36240-4-git-send-email-yang.shi@linux.alibaba.com
Signed-off-by: Yang Shi 
Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov 
Reviewed-by: Kirill Tkhai 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Michal Hocko 
Cc: "Kirill A . Shutemov" 
Cc: Hugh Dickins 
Cc: Shakeel Butt 
Cc: David Rientjes 
Cc: Qian Cai 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

memcg, kmem: deprecate kmem.limit_in_bytes

2019-09-24T22:54:10+00:00

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: Michal Hocko 
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt 
Cc: Johannes Weiner 
Cc: Vladimir Davydov 
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin 
Cc: Thomas Lindroth 
Cc: Tetsuo Handa 
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton 
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds