oom: add oom_kill_allocating_task sysctl

Adds a new sysctl, 'oom_kill_allocating_task', which will automatically kill
the OOM-triggering task instead of scanning through the tasklist to find a
memory-hogging target.  This is helpful for systems with an insanely large
number of tasks where scanning the tasklist significantly degrades
performance.

Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
Signed-off-by: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 22 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index a0ccc5b6026..17346da636e 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -31,6 +31,7 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
 - min_unmapped_ratio
 - min_slab_ratio
 - panic_on_oom
+- oom_kill_allocating_task
 - mmap_min_address
 - numa_zonelist_order
 
@@ -220,6 +221,27 @@ The default value is 0.
 1 and 2 are for failover of clustering. Please select either
 according to your policy of failover.
 
+=============================================================
+
+oom_kill_allocating_task
+
+This enables or disables killing the OOM-triggering task in
+out-of-memory situations.
+
+If this is set to zero, the OOM killer will scan through the entire
+tasklist and select a task based on heuristics to kill.  This normally
+selects a rogue memory-hogging task that frees up a large amount of
+memory when killed.
+
+If this is set to non-zero, the OOM killer simply kills the task that
+triggered the out-of-memory condition.  This avoids the expensive
+tasklist scan.
+
+If panic_on_oom is selected, it takes precedence over whatever value
+is used in oom_kill_allocating_task.
+
+The default value is 0.
+
 ==============================================================
 
 mmap_min_addr