memcg, kmem: deprecate kmem.limit_in_bytes

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 <mhocko@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrey Ryabinin <aryabinin@virtuozzo.com>
Cc: Thomas Lindroth <thomas.lindroth@gmail.com>
Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@i-love.sakura.ne.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v1/memory.rst b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v1/memory.rst
index 41bdc038dad9..0ae4f564c2d6 100644
--- a/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v1/memory.rst
+++ b/Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v1/memory.rst
@@ -85,8 +85,10 @@ Brief summary of control files.
  memory.oom_control		     set/show oom controls.
  memory.numa_stat		     show the number of memory usage per numa
 				     node
-
  memory.kmem.limit_in_bytes          set/show hard limit for kernel memory
+                                     This knob is deprecated and shouldn't be
+                                     used. It is planned that this be removed in
+                                     the foreseeable future.
  memory.kmem.usage_in_bytes          show current kernel memory allocation
  memory.kmem.failcnt                 show the number of kernel memory usage
 				     hits limits