[lttng-dev] [diamon-discuss] [RELEASE] LTTng-modules 2.9.11, 2.10.8, 2.11.0-rc2 (Linux kernel tracer)

[Joel Fernandes]

On Thu, Nov 1, 2018 at 3:56 PM Mathieu Desnoyers
<mathieu.desnoyers at efficios.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> This is a set of bugfix releases of the LTTng modules kernel tracer.
> It covers the three currently active lttng-modules branches: the
> 2.9 and 2.10 stable branches, as well as the 2.11 branch in release
> candidate cycle.
>
> Those releases add support for kernel 4.19.
>
> One important improvement is to prevent allocation of buffers larger
> than the available memory, which can cause the OOM killer to trigger.
> Even if the OOM killer end up having to trigger, the current OOM kill
> target is set to the current thread while allocating buffers.

This is interesting. Me and Steve were looking at exactly this issue
with the ftrace ring buffer a few months ago. Turns out that even
setting the OOM kill target may not be enough to prevent all OOMs. I
don't remember the reason why not, I'll have to dig out those threads
but that's what the -mm folks said at the time. I did remember vaguely
that I tested it and the kill target doesn't always get killed.. its
possible that something *other* parallel allocation can be victimized
AFAIR, even though the culprit is the kill target.

 - Joel