The memcg control knobs indicate the highest possible value using the
symbolic name "infinity", which is long and awkward to type.
Switch to the string "max", which is just as descriptive but shorter and
sweeter.
This changes a user interface, so do it before the release and before
the development flag is dropped from the default hierarchy.
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov@parallels.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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>
Until now, cftype arrays carried files for both the default and legacy
hierarchies and the files which needed to be used on only one of them
were flagged with either CFTYPE_ONLY_ON_DFL or CFTYPE_INSANE. This
gets confusing very quickly and we may end up exposing interface files
to the default hierarchy without thinking it through.
This patch makes cgroup core provide separate sets of interfaces for
cftype handling so that the cftypes for the default and legacy
hierarchies are clearly distinguished. The previous two patches
renamed the existing ones so that they clearly indicate that they're
for the legacy hierarchies. This patch adds the interface for the
default hierarchy and apply them selectively depending on the
hierarchy type.
* cftypes added through cgroup_subsys->dfl_cftypes and
cgroup_add_dfl_cftypes() only show up on the default hierarchy.
* cftypes added through cgroup_subsys->legacy_cftypes and
cgroup_add_legacy_cftypes() only show up on the legacy hierarchies.
* cgroup_subsys->dfl_cftypes and ->legacy_cftypes can point to the
same array for the cases where the interface files are identical on
both types of hierarchies.
* This makes all the existing subsystem interface files legacy-only by
default and all subsystems will have no interface file created when
enabled on the default hierarchy. Each subsystem should explicitly
review and compose the interface for the default hierarchy.
* A boot param "cgroup__DEVEL__legacy_files_on_dfl" is added which
makes subsystems which haven't decided the interface files for the
default hierarchy to present the legacy files on the default
hierarchy so that its behavior on the default hierarchy can be
tested. As the awkward name suggests, this is for development only.
* memcg's CFTYPE_INSANE on "use_hierarchy" is noop now as the whole
array isn't used on the default hierarchy. The flag is removed.
v2: Updated documentation for cgroup__DEVEL__legacy_files_on_dfl.
v3: Clear CFTYPE_ONLY_ON_DFL and CFTYPE_INSANE when cfts are removed
as suggested by Li.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Neil Horman <nhorman@tuxdriver.com>
Acked-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo <acme@kernel.org>
Cc: Aristeu Rozanski <aris@redhat.com>
Cc: Aneesh Kumar K.V <aneesh.kumar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Currently, the blkio subsystem attributes all of writeback IOs to the
root. One of the issues is that there's no way to tell who originated
a writeback IO from block layer. Those IOs are usually issued
asynchronously from a task which didn't have anything to do with
actually generating the dirty pages. The memory subsystem, when
enabled, already keeps track of the ownership of each dirty page and
it's desirable for blkio to piggyback instead of adding its own
per-page tag.
blkio piggybacking on memory is an implementation detail which
preferably should be handled automatically without requiring explicit
userland action. To achieve that, this patch implements
cgroup_subsys->depends_on which contains the mask of subsystems which
should be enabled together when the subsystem is enabled.
The previous patches already implemented the support for enabled but
invisible subsystems and cgroup_subsys->depends_on can be easily
implemented by updating cgroup_refresh_child_subsys_mask() so that it
calculates cgroup->child_subsys_mask considering
cgroup_subsys->depends_on of the explicitly enabled subsystems.
Documentation/cgroups/unified-hierarchy.txt is updated to explain that
subsystems may not become immediately available after being unused
from userland and that dependency could be a factor in it. As
subsystems may already keep residual references, this doesn't
significantly change how subsystem rebinding can be used.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Unified hierarchy will be the new version of cgroup interface. This
patch adds Documentation/cgroups/unified-hierarchy.txt which describes
the design and rationales of unified hierarchy.
v2: Grammatical updates as per Randy Dunlap's review.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Johannes Weiner