GitLab

commit a4ebf1b6 upstream.

Memory cgroup charging allows killed or exiting tasks to exceed the hard
limit.  It is assumed that the amount of the memory charged by those
tasks is bound and most of the memory will get released while the task
is exiting.  This is resembling a heuristic for the global OOM situation
when tasks get access to memory reserves.  There is no global memory
shortage at the memcg level so the memcg heuristic is more relieved.

The above assumption is overly optimistic though.  E.g.  vmalloc can
scale to really large requests and the heuristic would allow that.  We
used to have an early break in the vmalloc allocator for killed tasks
but this has been reverted by commit b8c8a338 ("Revert "vmalloc:
back off when the current task is killed"").  There are likely other
similar code paths which do not check for fatal signals in an
allocation&charge loop.  Also there are some kernel objects c...