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Johannes Weiner authored
Introduce the basic control files to account, partition, and limit memory using cgroups in default hierarchy mode. This interface versioning allows us to address fundamental design issues in the existing memory cgroup interface, further explained below. The old interface will be maintained indefinitely, but a clearer model and improved workload performance should encourage existing users to switch over to the new one eventually. The control files are thus: - memory.current shows the current consumption of the cgroup and its descendants, in bytes. - memory.low configures the lower end of the cgroup's expected memory consumption range. The kernel considers memory below that boundary to be a reserve - the minimum that the workload needs in order to make forward progress - and generally avoids reclaiming it, unless there is an imminent risk of entering an OOM situation. - memory.high configures the upper end of the cgroup's expected memory consumption range. A cgroup whose consumption grows beyond this threshold is forced into direct reclaim, to work off the excess and to throttle new allocations heavily, but is generally allowed to continue and the OOM killer is not invoked. - memory.max configures the hard maximum amount of memory that the cgroup is allowed to consume before the OOM killer is invoked. - memory.events shows event counters that indicate how often the cgroup was reclaimed while below memory.low, how often it was forced to reclaim excess beyond memory.high, how often it hit memory.max, and how often it entered OOM due to memory.max. This allows users to identify configuration problems when observing a degradation in workload performance. An overcommitted system will have an increased rate of low boundary breaches, whereas increased rates of high limit breaches, maximum hits, or even OOM situations will indicate internally overcommitted cgroups. For existing users of memory cgroups, the following deviations from the current interface are worth pointing out and explaining: - The original lower boundary, the soft limit, is defined as a limit that is per default unset. As a result, the set of cgroups that global reclaim prefers is opt-in, rather than opt-out. The costs for optimizing these mostly negative lookups are so high that the implementation, despite its enormous size, does not even provide the basic desirable behavior. First off, the soft limit has no hierarchical meaning. All configured groups are organized in a global rbtree and treated like equal peers, regardless where they are located in the hierarchy. This makes subtree delegation impossible. Second, the soft limit reclaim pass is so aggressive that it not just introduces high allocation latencies into the system, but also impacts system performance due to overreclaim, to the point where the feature becomes self-defeating. The memory.low boundary on the other hand is a top-down allocated reserve. A cgroup enjoys reclaim protection when it and all its ancestors are below their low boundaries, which makes delegation of subtrees possible. Secondly, new cgroups have no reserve per default and in the common case most cgroups are eligible for the preferred reclaim pass. This allows the new low boundary to be efficiently implemented with just a minor addition to the generic reclaim code, without the need for out-of-band data structures and reclaim passes. Because the generic reclaim code considers all cgroups except for the ones running low in the preferred first reclaim pass, overreclaim of individual groups is eliminated as well, resulting in much better overall workload performance. - The original high boundary, the hard limit, is defined as a strict limit that can not budge, even if the OOM killer has to be called. But this generally goes against the goal of making the most out of the available memory. The memory consumption of workloads varies during runtime, and that requires users to overcommit. But doing that with a strict upper limit requires either a fairly accurate prediction of the working set size or adding slack to the limit. Since working set size estimation is hard and error prone, and getting it wrong results in OOM kills, most users tend to err on the side of a looser limit and end up wasting precious resources. The memory.high boundary on the other hand can be set much more conservatively. When hit, it throttles allocations by forcing them into direct reclaim to work off the excess, but it never invokes the OOM killer. As a result, a high boundary that is chosen too aggressively will not terminate the processes, but instead it will lead to gradual performance degradation. The user can monitor this and make corrections until the minimal memory footprint that still gives acceptable performance is found. In extreme cases, with many concurrent allocations and a complete breakdown of reclaim progress within the group, the high boundary can be exceeded. But even then it's mostly better to satisfy the allocation from the slack available in other groups or the rest of the system than killing the group. Otherwise, memory.max is there to limit this type of spillover and ultimately contain buggy or even malicious applications. - The original control file names are unwieldy and inconsistent in many different ways. For example, the upper boundary hit count is exported in the memory.failcnt file, but an OOM event count has to be manually counted by listening to memory.oom_control events, and lower boundary / soft limit events have to be counted by first setting a threshold for that value and then counting those events. Also, usage and limit files encode their units in the filename. That makes the filenames very long, even though this is not information that a user needs to be reminded of every time they type out those names. To address these naming issues, as well as to signal clearly that the new interface carries a new configuration model, the naming conventions in it necessarily differ from the old interface. - The original limit files indicate the state of an unset limit with a very high number, and a configured limit can be unset by echoing -1 into those files. But that very high number is implementation and architecture dependent and not very descriptive. And while -1 can be understood as an underflow into the highest possible value, -2 or -10M etc. do not work, so it's not inconsistent. memory.low, memory.high, and memory.max will use the string "infinity" to indicate and set the highest possible value. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: use seq_puts() for basic strings] Signed-off-by:
Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org> Acked-by:
Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz> Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com> Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com> Signed-off-by:
Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by:
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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