GitLab

commit 465adcf1

A memcg may livelock when oom if the process that grabs the hierarchy's
oom lock is never the first process with PF_EXITING set in the memcg's
task iteration.

The oom killer, both global and memcg, will defer if it finds an
eligible process that is in the process of exiting and it is not being
ptraced.  The idea is to allow it to exit without using memory reserves
before needlessly killing another process.

This normally works fine except in the memcg case with a large number of
threads attached to the oom memcg.  In this case, the memcg oom killer
only gets called for the process that grabs the hierarchy's oom lock;
all others end up blocked on the memcg's oom waitqueue.  Thus, if the
process that grabs the hierarchy's oom lock is never the first
PF_EXITING process in the memcg's task iteration, the oom killer is
constantly deferred without anything making progress.

The fix is to give PF_EXITING...