The old implementation

Before v2.6.36, the calculation of badness score tried to be smarter, besides looking for the total memory usage (task->mm->total_vm), it also considered: - Whether the process creates a lot of children - Whether the process has been running for a long time, or has used a lot of CPU time - Whether the process has a low nice value - Whether the process is privileged (CAP_SYS_ADMIN or CAP_SYS_RESOURCE set) - Whether the process is making direct hardware access

At first glance, all these criteria looks valid, but if you think about it a bit, there is a lot of pitfalls here which makes the selection not so fair. For example: A process that creates a lot of children and consumes some memory could be a leaky web server. Another process that fits into the description is your session manager for your desktop environment which naturally creates a lot of child processes.

The new implementation

This heuristic selection has evolved over time, instead of looking on mm->total_vm for each task, the task's RSS (resident set size, [2]) and swap space is used instead. RSS and Swap space gives a better indication of the amount that we will be able to free if we chose this task. The drawback with using mm->total_vm is that it includes overcommitted memory ( see [3] for more information ) which is pages that the process has claimed but hasn't been physically allocated.

The process is now only counted as privileged if CAP_SYS_ADMIN is set, not CAP_SYS_RESOURCE as before.

The code

The whole implementation of OOM killer is located in mm/oom_kill.c. The function oom_badness() will be called for each task in the system and returns the calculated badness score.

Let's go through the function.

1    unsigned long oom_badness(struct task_struct *p, struct mem_cgroup *memcg,
2                  const nodemask_t *nodemask, unsigned long totalpages)
3    {
4        long points;
5        long adj;
6
7        if (oom_unkillable_task(p, memcg, nodemask))
8            return 0;

Looking for unkillable tasks such as the global init process.

 1        p = find_lock_task_mm(p);
 2        if (!p)
 3            return 0;
 4
 5        adj = (long)p->signal->oom_score_adj;
 6        if (adj == OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN ||
 7                test_bit(MMF_OOM_SKIP, &p->mm->flags) ||
 8                in_vfork(p)) {
 9            task_unlock(p);
10            return 0;
11        }

If proc/[pid]/oom_score_adj is set to OOM_SCORE_ADJ_MIN (-1000), do not even consider this task:

1        points = get_mm_rss(p->mm) + get_mm_counter(p->mm, MM_SWAPENTS) +
2            atomic_long_read(&p->mm->nr_ptes) + mm_nr_pmds(p->mm);
3        task_unlock(p);

Calculate a score based on RSS, pagetables and used swap space:

1        if (has_capability_noaudit(p, CAP_SYS_ADMIN))
2            points -= (points * 3) / 100;

If it's root process, give it a 3% discount. We are no mean people after all:

1        adj *= totalpages / 1000;
2        points += adj;

Normalize and add the oom_score_adj value :

1        return points > 0 ? points : 1;

At last, never return 0 for an eligible task as it's reserved for non killable tasks

}

Conclusion

The OOM logic is quite straightforward and seems to have been stable for a long time (v2.6.36 was released in october 2010). The reason why I was looking at the code was that I did not think the behavior I saw when experimenting corresponds to what was written in the man page for oom_score. It turned out that the manpage was not updated when the new calculation was introduced back in 2010.

I have updated the manpage and it's available in v4.14 of the Linux manpage project [4].

commit 5753354a3af20c8b361ec3d53caf68f7217edf48
Author: Marcus Folkesson <marcus.folkesson@gmail.com>
Date:   Fri Nov 17 13:09:44 2017 +0100

    proc.5: Update description of /proc/<pid>/oom_score

    After Linux 2.6.36, the heuristic calculation of oom_score
    has changed to only consider used memory and CAP_SYS_ADMIN.

    See kernel commit a63d83f427fbce97a6cea0db2e64b0eb8435cd10.

    Signed-off-by: Marcus Folkesson <marcus.folkesson@gmail.com>
    Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>

diff --git a/man5/proc.5 b/man5/proc.5
index 82d4a0646..4e44b8fba 100644
--- a/man5/proc.5
+++ b/man5/proc.5
@@ -1395,7 +1395,9 @@ Since Linux 2.6.36, use of this file is deprecated in favor of
 .IR /proc/[pid]/oom_score_adj .
 .TP
 .IR /proc/[pid]/oom_score " (since Linux 2.6.11)"
-.\" See mm/oom_kill.c::badness() in the 2.6.25 sources
+.\" See mm/oom_kill.c::badness() in pre 2.6.36 sources
+.\" See mm/oom_kill.c::oom_badness() after 2.6.36
+.\" commit a63d83f427fbce97a6cea0db2e64b0eb8435cd10
 This file displays the current score that the kernel gives to
 this process for the purpose of selecting a process
 for the OOM-killer.
@@ -1403,7 +1405,16 @@ A higher score means that the process is more likely to be
 selected by the OOM-killer.
 The basis for this score is the amount of memory used by the process,
 with increases (+) or decreases (\-) for factors including:
-.\" See mm/oom_kill.c::badness() in the 2.6.25 sources
+.\" See mm/oom_kill.c::badness() in pre 2.6.36 sources
+.\" See mm/oom_kill.c::oom_badness() after 2.6.36
+.\" commit a63d83f427fbce97a6cea0db2e64b0eb8435cd10
+.RS
+.IP * 2
+whether the process is privileged (\-);
+.\" More precisely, if it has CAP_SYS_ADMIN or (pre 2.6.36) CAP_SYS_RESOURCE
+.RE
+.IP
+Before kernel 2.6.36 the following factors were also used in the calculation of oom_score:
 .RS
 .IP * 2
 whether the process creates a lot of children using
@@ -1413,10 +1424,7 @@ whether the process creates a lot of children using
 whether the process has been running a long time,
 or has used a lot of CPU time (\-);
 .IP *
-whether the process has a low nice value (i.e., > 0) (+);
-.IP *
-whether the process is privileged (\-); and
-.\" More precisely, if it has CAP_SYS_ADMIN or CAP_SYS_RESOURCE
+whether the process has a low nice value (i.e., > 0) (+); and
 .IP *
 whether the process is making direct hardware access (\-).
 .\" More precisely, if it has CAP_SYS_RAWIO

References