Kirill A. Shutemov <kir...@shutemov.name> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 08:23:57AM +0100, Florian Westphal wrote: > > > vmalloc() once became killable by commit 5d17a73a2ebeb8d1 ("vmalloc: back > > > off when the current task is killed") but then became unkillable by commit > > > b8c8a338f75e052d ("Revert "vmalloc: back off when the current task is > > > killed""). Therefore, we can't handle this problem from MM side. > > > Please consider adding some limit from networking side. > > > > I don't know what "some limit" would be. I would prefer if there was > > a way to supress OOM Killer in first place so we can just -ENOMEM user. > > Just supressing OOM kill is a bad idea. We still leave a way to allocate > arbitrary large buffer in kernel.
Isn't that what we do everywhere in network stack? I think we should try to allocate whatever amount of memory is needed for the given xtables ruleset, given that is what admin requested us to do. I also would not know what limit is sane -- I've seen setups with as much as 100k iptables rules, and that was 5 years ago. And even if we add a "Xk rules" limit, it might be too much for low-memory systems, or not enough for whatever other use case there might be.