Comment 4 for bug 602261

I have been able to duplicate this with the ureadahead bug, in combination with a profile reload. The apparmor_parser depending on your set up is using between 50 - 100 MB to recompile policy, putting an addition stress on the VM. In addition when the policy is loaded the kernel will try to allocate a large number of consecutive pages before falling back to kvmalloc.

We have done a few things to reduce how apparmor is using memory, and how much it is using. The kernel has picked up a patch to reduce the amount of memory being kmalloced in continuous pages. This can reduce the pressure on the kernel memory subsystem.

User space has had some patches applied reducing peak memory usage. Both kernel and user space will be part of alpha3, and help reduce the chance that AppArmor can trigger this condition.

I have not been able to reproduce this bug with out ureadahed consuming large amounts of memory.