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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