By default, vmpressure events are not pass-through, i.e.  they propagate
up through the memcg hierarchy until an event notifier is found for any
threshold level.

This presents a difficulty when a thread waiting on a read(2) for a
vmpressure event cannot distinguish between local memory pressure and
memory pressure in a descendant memcg, especially when that thread may
not control the memcg hierarchy.

Consider a user-controlled child memcg with a smaller limit than a
top-level memcg controlled by the "Activity Manager" specified in
Documentation/cgroup-v1/memory.txt.  It may register for memory pressure
notification for descendant memcgs to make a policy decision: oom kill a
low priority job, increase the limit, decrease other limits, etc.  If it
registers for memory pressure notification on the top-level memcg, it
currently cannot distinguish between memory pressure in its own memcg or
a descendant memcg, which is user-controlled.

Conversely, if a user ...