[PATCH] Terminate process that fails on a constrained allocation

Some allocations are restricted to a limited set of nodes (due to memory
policies or cpuset constraints).  If the page allocator is not able to find
enough memory then that does not mean that overall system memory is low.

In particular going postal and more or less randomly shooting at processes
is not likely going to help the situation but may just lead to suicide (the
whole system coming down).

It is better to signal to the process that no memory exists given the
constraints that the process (or the configuration of the process) has
placed on the allocation behavior.  The process may be killed but then the
sysadmin or developer can investigate the situation.  The solution is
similar to what we do when running out of hugepages.

This patch adds a check before we kill processes.  At that point
performance considerations do not matter much so we just scan the zonelist
and reconstruct a list of nodes.  If the list of nodes does not contain all
online nodes then this is a constrained allocation and we should kill the
current process.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Andi Kleen <ak@muc.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/mm/page_alloc.c b/mm/page_alloc.c
index 208812b25597..791690d7d3fa 100644
--- a/mm/page_alloc.c
+++ b/mm/page_alloc.c
@@ -1015,7 +1015,7 @@ rebalance:
                 if (page)
                         goto got_pg;
 
-                out_of_memory(gfp_mask, order);
+                out_of_memory(zonelist, gfp_mask, order);
                 goto restart;
         }