| Memory Resource Controller | |
| NOTE: The Memory Resource Controller has generically been referred to as the | |
| memory controller in this document. Do not confuse memory controller | |
| used here with the memory controller that is used in hardware. | |
| (For editors) | |
| In this document: | |
| When we mention a cgroup (cgroupfs's directory) with memory controller, | |
| we call it "memory cgroup". When you see git-log and source code, you'll | |
| see patch's title and function names tend to use "memcg". | |
| In this document, we avoid using it. | |
| Benefits and Purpose of the memory controller | |
| The memory controller isolates the memory behaviour of a group of tasks | |
| from the rest of the system. The article on LWN [12] mentions some probable | |
| uses of the memory controller. The memory controller can be used to | |
| a. Isolate an application or a group of applications | |
| Memory hungry applications can be isolated and limited to a smaller | |
| amount of memory. | |
| b. Create a cgroup with limited amount of memory, this can be used | |
| as a good alternative to booting with mem=XXXX. | |
| c. Virtualization solutions can control the amount of memory they want | |
| to assign to a virtual machine instance. | |
| d. A CD/DVD burner could control the amount of memory used by the | |
| rest of the system to ensure that burning does not fail due to lack | |
| of available memory. | |
| e. There are several other use cases, find one or use the controller just | |
| for fun (to learn and hack on the VM subsystem). | |
| Current Status: linux-2.6.34-mmotm(development version of 2010/April) | |
| Features: | |
| - accounting anonymous pages, file caches, swap caches usage and limiting them. | |
| - private LRU and reclaim routine. (system's global LRU and private LRU | |
| work independently from each other) | |
| - optionally, memory+swap usage can be accounted and limited. | |
| - hierarchical accounting | |
| - soft limit | |
| - moving(recharging) account at moving a task is selectable. | |
| - usage threshold notifier | |
| - oom-killer disable knob and oom-notifier | |
| - Root cgroup has no limit controls. | |
| Kernel memory and Hugepages are not under control yet. We just manage | |
| pages on LRU. To add more controls, we have to take care of performance. | |
| Brief summary of control files. | |
| tasks # attach a task(thread) and show list of threads | |
| cgroup.procs # show list of processes | |
| cgroup.event_control # an interface for event_fd() | |
| memory.usage_in_bytes # show current res_counter usage for memory | |
| (See 5.5 for details) | |
| memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes # show current res_counter usage for memory+Swap | |
| (See 5.5 for details) | |
| memory.limit_in_bytes # set/show limit of memory usage | |
| memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes # set/show limit of memory+Swap usage | |
| memory.failcnt # show the number of memory usage hits limits | |
| memory.memsw.failcnt # show the number of memory+Swap hits limits | |
| memory.max_usage_in_bytes # show max memory usage recorded | |
| memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes # show max memory+Swap usage recorded | |
| memory.soft_limit_in_bytes # set/show soft limit of memory usage | |
| memory.stat # show various statistics | |
| memory.use_hierarchy # set/show hierarchical account enabled | |
| memory.force_empty # trigger forced move charge to parent | |
| memory.swappiness # set/show swappiness parameter of vmscan | |
| (See sysctl's vm.swappiness) | |
| memory.move_charge_at_immigrate # set/show controls of moving charges | |
| memory.oom_control # set/show oom controls. | |
| memory.numa_stat # show the number of memory usage per numa node | |
| 1. History | |
| The memory controller has a long history. A request for comments for the memory | |
| controller was posted by Balbir Singh [1]. At the time the RFC was posted | |
| there were several implementations for memory control. The goal of the | |
| RFC was to build consensus and agreement for the minimal features required | |
| for memory control. The first RSS controller was posted by Balbir Singh[2] | |
| in Feb 2007. Pavel Emelianov [3][4][5] has since posted three versions of the | |
| RSS controller. At OLS, at the resource management BoF, everyone suggested | |
| that we handle both page cache and RSS together. Another request was raised | |
| to allow user space handling of OOM. The current memory controller is | |
| at version 6; it combines both mapped (RSS) and unmapped Page | |
| Cache Control [11]. | |
| 2. Memory Control | |
| Memory is a unique resource in the sense that it is present in a limited | |
| amount. If a task requires a lot of CPU processing, the task can spread | |
| its processing over a period of hours, days, months or years, but with | |
| memory, the same physical memory needs to be reused to accomplish the task. | |
| The memory controller implementation has been divided into phases. These | |
| are: | |
| 1. Memory controller | |
| 2. mlock(2) controller | |
| 3. Kernel user memory accounting and slab control | |
| 4. user mappings length controller | |
| The memory controller is the first controller developed. | |
| 2.1. Design | |
| The core of the design is a counter called the res_counter. The res_counter | |
| tracks the current memory usage and limit of the group of processes associated | |
| with the controller. Each cgroup has a memory controller specific data | |
| structure (mem_cgroup) associated with it. | |
| 2.2. Accounting | |
| +--------------------+ | |
| | mem_cgroup | | |
| | (res_counter) | | |
| +--------------------+ | |
| / ^ \ | |
| / | \ | |
| +---------------+ | +---------------+ | |
| | mm_struct | |.... | mm_struct | | |
| | | | | | | |
| +---------------+ | +---------------+ | |
| | | |
| + --------------+ | |
| | | |
| +---------------+ +------+--------+ | |
| | page +----------> page_cgroup| | |
| | | | | | |
| +---------------+ +---------------+ | |
| (Figure 1: Hierarchy of Accounting) | |
| Figure 1 shows the important aspects of the controller | |
| 1. Accounting happens per cgroup | |
| 2. Each mm_struct knows about which cgroup it belongs to | |
| 3. Each page has a pointer to the page_cgroup, which in turn knows the | |
| cgroup it belongs to | |
| The accounting is done as follows: mem_cgroup_charge() is invoked to setup | |
| the necessary data structures and check if the cgroup that is being charged | |
| is over its limit. If it is then reclaim is invoked on the cgroup. | |
| More details can be found in the reclaim section of this document. | |
| If everything goes well, a page meta-data-structure called page_cgroup is | |
| updated. page_cgroup has its own LRU on cgroup. | |
| (*) page_cgroup structure is allocated at boot/memory-hotplug time. | |
| 2.2.1 Accounting details | |
| All mapped anon pages (RSS) and cache pages (Page Cache) are accounted. | |
| Some pages which are never reclaimable and will not be on the global LRU | |
| are not accounted. We just account pages under usual VM management. | |
| RSS pages are accounted at page_fault unless they've already been accounted | |
| for earlier. A file page will be accounted for as Page Cache when it's | |
| inserted into inode (radix-tree). While it's mapped into the page tables of | |
| processes, duplicate accounting is carefully avoided. | |
| A RSS page is unaccounted when it's fully unmapped. A PageCache page is | |
| unaccounted when it's removed from radix-tree. Even if RSS pages are fully | |
| unmapped (by kswapd), they may exist as SwapCache in the system until they | |
| are really freed. Such SwapCaches also also accounted. | |
| A swapped-in page is not accounted until it's mapped. | |
| Note: The kernel does swapin-readahead and read multiple swaps at once. | |
| This means swapped-in pages may contain pages for other tasks than a task | |
| causing page fault. So, we avoid accounting at swap-in I/O. | |
| At page migration, accounting information is kept. | |
| Note: we just account pages-on-LRU because our purpose is to control amount | |
| of used pages; not-on-LRU pages tend to be out-of-control from VM view. | |
| 2.3 Shared Page Accounting | |
| Shared pages are accounted on the basis of the first touch approach. The | |
| cgroup that first touches a page is accounted for the page. The principle | |
| behind this approach is that a cgroup that aggressively uses a shared | |
| page will eventually get charged for it (once it is uncharged from | |
| the cgroup that brought it in -- this will happen on memory pressure). | |
| Exception: If CONFIG_CGROUP_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP is not used. | |
| When you do swapoff and make swapped-out pages of shmem(tmpfs) to | |
| be backed into memory in force, charges for pages are accounted against the | |
| caller of swapoff rather than the users of shmem. | |
| 2.4 Swap Extension (CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP) | |
| Swap Extension allows you to record charge for swap. A swapped-in page is | |
| charged back to original page allocator if possible. | |
| When swap is accounted, following files are added. | |
| - memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes. | |
| - memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes. | |
| memsw means memory+swap. Usage of memory+swap is limited by | |
| memsw.limit_in_bytes. | |
| Example: Assume a system with 4G of swap. A task which allocates 6G of memory | |
| (by mistake) under 2G memory limitation will use all swap. | |
| In this case, setting memsw.limit_in_bytes=3G will prevent bad use of swap. | |
| By using memsw limit, you can avoid system OOM which can be caused by swap | |
| shortage. | |
| * why 'memory+swap' rather than swap. | |
| The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means | |
| to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of | |
| memory+swap. In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without | |
| affecting global LRU, memory+swap limit is better than just limiting swap from | |
| OS point of view. | |
| * What happens when a cgroup hits memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes | |
| When a cgroup hits memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes, it's useless to do swap-out | |
| in this cgroup. Then, swap-out will not be done by cgroup routine and file | |
| caches are dropped. But as mentioned above, global LRU can do swapout memory | |
| from it for sanity of the system's memory management state. You can't forbid | |
| it by cgroup. | |
| 2.5 Reclaim | |
| Each cgroup maintains a per cgroup LRU which has the same structure as | |
| global VM. When a cgroup goes over its limit, we first try | |
| to reclaim memory from the cgroup so as to make space for the new | |
| pages that the cgroup has touched. If the reclaim is unsuccessful, | |
| an OOM routine is invoked to select and kill the bulkiest task in the | |
| cgroup. (See 10. OOM Control below.) | |
| The reclaim algorithm has not been modified for cgroups, except that | |
| pages that are selected for reclaiming come from the per cgroup LRU | |
| list. | |
| NOTE: Reclaim does not work for the root cgroup, since we cannot set any | |
| limits on the root cgroup. | |
| Note2: When panic_on_oom is set to "2", the whole system will panic. | |
| When oom event notifier is registered, event will be delivered. | |
| (See oom_control section) | |
| 2.6 Locking | |
| lock_page_cgroup()/unlock_page_cgroup() should not be called under | |
| mapping->tree_lock. | |
| Other lock order is following: | |
| PG_locked. | |
| mm->page_table_lock | |
| zone->lru_lock | |
| lock_page_cgroup. | |
| In many cases, just lock_page_cgroup() is called. | |
| per-zone-per-cgroup LRU (cgroup's private LRU) is just guarded by | |
| zone->lru_lock, it has no lock of its own. | |
| 3. User Interface | |
| 0. Configuration | |
| a. Enable CONFIG_CGROUPS | |
| b. Enable CONFIG_RESOURCE_COUNTERS | |
| c. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR | |
| d. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP (to use swap extension) | |
| 1. Prepare the cgroups (see cgroups.txt, Why are cgroups needed?) | |
| # mount -t tmpfs none /sys/fs/cgroup | |
| # mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory | |
| # mount -t cgroup none /sys/fs/cgroup/memory -o memory | |
| 2. Make the new group and move bash into it | |
| # mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0 | |
| # echo $$ > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/tasks | |
| Since now we're in the 0 cgroup, we can alter the memory limit: | |
| # echo 4M > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/memory.limit_in_bytes | |
| NOTE: We can use a suffix (k, K, m, M, g or G) to indicate values in kilo, | |
| mega or gigabytes. (Here, Kilo, Mega, Giga are Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes.) | |
| NOTE: We can write "-1" to reset the *.limit_in_bytes(unlimited). | |
| NOTE: We cannot set limits on the root cgroup any more. | |
| # cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/memory.limit_in_bytes | |
| 4194304 | |
| We can check the usage: | |
| # cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/memory.usage_in_bytes | |
| 1216512 | |
| A successful write to this file does not guarantee a successful set of | |
| this limit to the value written into the file. This can be due to a | |
| number of factors, such as rounding up to page boundaries or the total | |
| availability of memory on the system. The user is required to re-read | |
| this file after a write to guarantee the value committed by the kernel. | |
| # echo 1 > memory.limit_in_bytes | |
| # cat memory.limit_in_bytes | |
| 4096 | |
| The memory.failcnt field gives the number of times that the cgroup limit was | |
| exceeded. | |
| The memory.stat file gives accounting information. Now, the number of | |
| caches, RSS and Active pages/Inactive pages are shown. | |
| 4. Testing | |
| For testing features and implementation, see memcg_test.txt. | |
| Performance test is also important. To see pure memory controller's overhead, | |
| testing on tmpfs will give you good numbers of small overheads. | |
| Example: do kernel make on tmpfs. | |
| Page-fault scalability is also important. At measuring parallel | |
| page fault test, multi-process test may be better than multi-thread | |
| test because it has noise of shared objects/status. | |
| But the above two are testing extreme situations. | |
| Trying usual test under memory controller is always helpful. | |
| 4.1 Troubleshooting | |
| Sometimes a user might find that the application under a cgroup is | |
| terminated by OOM killer. There are several causes for this: | |
| 1. The cgroup limit is too low (just too low to do anything useful) | |
| 2. The user is using anonymous memory and swap is turned off or too low | |
| A sync followed by echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches will help get rid of | |
| some of the pages cached in the cgroup (page cache pages). | |
| To know what happens, disable OOM_Kill by 10. OOM Control(see below) and | |
| seeing what happens will be helpful. | |
| 4.2 Task migration | |
| When a task migrates from one cgroup to another, its charge is not | |
| carried forward by default. The pages allocated from the original cgroup still | |
| remain charged to it, the charge is dropped when the page is freed or | |
| reclaimed. | |
| You can move charges of a task along with task migration. | |
| See 8. "Move charges at task migration" | |
| 4.3 Removing a cgroup | |
| A cgroup can be removed by rmdir, but as discussed in sections 4.1 and 4.2, a | |
| cgroup might have some charge associated with it, even though all | |
| tasks have migrated away from it. (because we charge against pages, not | |
| against tasks.) | |
| Such charges are freed or moved to their parent. At moving, both of RSS | |
| and CACHES are moved to parent. | |
| rmdir() may return -EBUSY if freeing/moving fails. See 5.1 also. | |
| Charges recorded in swap information is not updated at removal of cgroup. | |
| Recorded information is discarded and a cgroup which uses swap (swapcache) | |
| will be charged as a new owner of it. | |
| 5. Misc. interfaces. | |
| 5.1 force_empty | |
| memory.force_empty interface is provided to make cgroup's memory usage empty. | |
| You can use this interface only when the cgroup has no tasks. | |
| When writing anything to this | |
| # echo 0 > memory.force_empty | |
| Almost all pages tracked by this memory cgroup will be unmapped and freed. | |
| Some pages cannot be freed because they are locked or in-use. Such pages are | |
| moved to parent and this cgroup will be empty. This may return -EBUSY if | |
| VM is too busy to free/move all pages immediately. | |
| Typical use case of this interface is that calling this before rmdir(). | |
| Because rmdir() moves all pages to parent, some out-of-use page caches can be | |
| moved to the parent. If you want to avoid that, force_empty will be useful. | |
| 5.2 stat file | |
| memory.stat file includes following statistics | |
| # per-memory cgroup local status | |
| cache - # of bytes of page cache memory. | |
| rss - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory. | |
| mapped_file - # of bytes of mapped file (includes tmpfs/shmem) | |
| pgpgin - # of pages paged in (equivalent to # of charging events). | |
| pgpgout - # of pages paged out (equivalent to # of uncharging events). | |
| swap - # of bytes of swap usage | |
| inactive_anon - # of bytes of anonymous memory and swap cache memory on | |
| LRU list. | |
| active_anon - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory on active | |
| inactive LRU list. | |
| inactive_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on inactive LRU list. | |
| active_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on active LRU list. | |
| unevictable - # of bytes of memory that cannot be reclaimed (mlocked etc). | |
| # status considering hierarchy (see memory.use_hierarchy settings) | |
| hierarchical_memory_limit - # of bytes of memory limit with regard to hierarchy | |
| under which the memory cgroup is | |
| hierarchical_memsw_limit - # of bytes of memory+swap limit with regard to | |
| hierarchy under which memory cgroup is. | |
| total_cache - sum of all children's "cache" | |
| total_rss - sum of all children's "rss" | |
| total_mapped_file - sum of all children's "cache" | |
| total_pgpgin - sum of all children's "pgpgin" | |
| total_pgpgout - sum of all children's "pgpgout" | |
| total_swap - sum of all children's "swap" | |
| total_inactive_anon - sum of all children's "inactive_anon" | |
| total_active_anon - sum of all children's "active_anon" | |
| total_inactive_file - sum of all children's "inactive_file" | |
| total_active_file - sum of all children's "active_file" | |
| total_unevictable - sum of all children's "unevictable" | |
| # The following additional stats are dependent on CONFIG_DEBUG_VM. | |
| inactive_ratio - VM internal parameter. (see mm/page_alloc.c) | |
| recent_rotated_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c) | |
| recent_rotated_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c) | |
| recent_scanned_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c) | |
| recent_scanned_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c) | |
| Memo: | |
| recent_rotated means recent frequency of LRU rotation. | |
| recent_scanned means recent # of scans to LRU. | |
| showing for better debug please see the code for meanings. | |
| Note: | |
| Only anonymous and swap cache memory is listed as part of 'rss' stat. | |
| This should not be confused with the true 'resident set size' or the | |
| amount of physical memory used by the cgroup. | |
| 'rss + file_mapped" will give you resident set size of cgroup. | |
| (Note: file and shmem may be shared among other cgroups. In that case, | |
| file_mapped is accounted only when the memory cgroup is owner of page | |
| cache.) | |
| 5.3 swappiness | |
| Similar to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but affecting a hierarchy of groups only. | |
| Following cgroups' swappiness can't be changed. | |
| - root cgroup (uses /proc/sys/vm/swappiness). | |
| - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and it has other cgroup(s) below it. | |
| - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and not the root of hierarchy. | |
| 5.4 failcnt | |
| A memory cgroup provides memory.failcnt and memory.memsw.failcnt files. | |
| This failcnt(== failure count) shows the number of times that a usage counter | |
| hit its limit. When a memory cgroup hits a limit, failcnt increases and | |
| memory under it will be reclaimed. | |
| You can reset failcnt by writing 0 to failcnt file. | |
| # echo 0 > .../memory.failcnt | |
| 5.5 usage_in_bytes | |
| For efficiency, as other kernel components, memory cgroup uses some optimization | |
| to avoid unnecessary cacheline false sharing. usage_in_bytes is affected by the | |
| method and doesn't show 'exact' value of memory(and swap) usage, it's an fuzz | |
| value for efficient access. (Of course, when necessary, it's synchronized.) | |
| If you want to know more exact memory usage, you should use RSS+CACHE(+SWAP) | |
| value in memory.stat(see 5.2). | |
| 5.6 numa_stat | |
| This is similar to numa_maps but operates on a per-memcg basis. This is | |
| useful for providing visibility into the numa locality information within | |
| an memcg since the pages are allowed to be allocated from any physical | |
| node. One of the usecases is evaluating application performance by | |
| combining this information with the application's cpu allocation. | |
| We export "total", "file", "anon" and "unevictable" pages per-node for | |
| each memcg. The ouput format of memory.numa_stat is: | |
| total=<total pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ... | |
| file=<total file pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ... | |
| anon=<total anon pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ... | |
| unevictable=<total anon pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ... | |
| And we have total = file + anon + unevictable. | |
| 6. Hierarchy support | |
| The memory controller supports a deep hierarchy and hierarchical accounting. | |
| The hierarchy is created by creating the appropriate cgroups in the | |
| cgroup filesystem. Consider for example, the following cgroup filesystem | |
| hierarchy | |
| root | |
| / | \ | |
| / | \ | |
| a b c | |
| | \ | |
| | \ | |
| d e | |
| In the diagram above, with hierarchical accounting enabled, all memory | |
| usage of e, is accounted to its ancestors up until the root (i.e, c and root), | |
| that has memory.use_hierarchy enabled. If one of the ancestors goes over its | |
| limit, the reclaim algorithm reclaims from the tasks in the ancestor and the | |
| children of the ancestor. | |
| 6.1 Enabling hierarchical accounting and reclaim | |
| A memory cgroup by default disables the hierarchy feature. Support | |
| can be enabled by writing 1 to memory.use_hierarchy file of the root cgroup | |
| # echo 1 > memory.use_hierarchy | |
| The feature can be disabled by | |
| # echo 0 > memory.use_hierarchy | |
| NOTE1: Enabling/disabling will fail if either the cgroup already has other | |
| cgroups created below it, or if the parent cgroup has use_hierarchy | |
| enabled. | |
| NOTE2: When panic_on_oom is set to "2", the whole system will panic in | |
| case of an OOM event in any cgroup. | |
| 7. Soft limits | |
| Soft limits allow for greater sharing of memory. The idea behind soft limits | |
| is to allow control groups to use as much of the memory as needed, provided | |
| a. There is no memory contention | |
| b. They do not exceed their hard limit | |
| When the system detects memory contention or low memory, control groups | |
| are pushed back to their soft limits. If the soft limit of each control | |
| group is very high, they are pushed back as much as possible to make | |
| sure that one control group does not starve the others of memory. | |
| Please note that soft limits is a best effort feature, it comes with | |
| no guarantees, but it does its best to make sure that when memory is | |
| heavily contended for, memory is allocated based on the soft limit | |
| hints/setup. Currently soft limit based reclaim is setup such that | |
| it gets invoked from balance_pgdat (kswapd). | |
| 7.1 Interface | |
| Soft limits can be setup by using the following commands (in this example we | |
| assume a soft limit of 256 MiB) | |
| # echo 256M > memory.soft_limit_in_bytes | |
| If we want to change this to 1G, we can at any time use | |
| # echo 1G > memory.soft_limit_in_bytes | |
| NOTE1: Soft limits take effect over a long period of time, since they involve | |
| reclaiming memory for balancing between memory cgroups | |
| NOTE2: It is recommended to set the soft limit always below the hard limit, | |
| otherwise the hard limit will take precedence. | |
| 8. Move charges at task migration | |
| Users can move charges associated with a task along with task migration, that | |
| is, uncharge task's pages from the old cgroup and charge them to the new cgroup. | |
| This feature is not supported in !CONFIG_MMU environments because of lack of | |
| page tables. | |
| 8.1 Interface | |
| This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled(and disabled again) by | |
| writing to memory.move_charge_at_immigrate of the destination cgroup. | |
| If you want to enable it: | |
| # echo (some positive value) > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate | |
| Note: Each bits of move_charge_at_immigrate has its own meaning about what type | |
| of charges should be moved. See 8.2 for details. | |
| Note: Charges are moved only when you move mm->owner, IOW, a leader of a thread | |
| group. | |
| Note: If we cannot find enough space for the task in the destination cgroup, we | |
| try to make space by reclaiming memory. Task migration may fail if we | |
| cannot make enough space. | |
| Note: It can take several seconds if you move charges much. | |
| And if you want disable it again: | |
| # echo 0 > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate | |
| 8.2 Type of charges which can be move | |
| Each bits of move_charge_at_immigrate has its own meaning about what type of | |
| charges should be moved. But in any cases, it must be noted that an account of | |
| a page or a swap can be moved only when it is charged to the task's current(old) | |
| memory cgroup. | |
| bit | what type of charges would be moved ? | |
| -----+------------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| 0 | A charge of an anonymous page(or swap of it) used by the target task. | |
| | Those pages and swaps must be used only by the target task. You must | |
| | enable Swap Extension(see 2.4) to enable move of swap charges. | |
| -----+------------------------------------------------------------------------ | |
| 1 | A charge of file pages(normal file, tmpfs file(e.g. ipc shared memory) | |
| | and swaps of tmpfs file) mmapped by the target task. Unlike the case of | |
| | anonymous pages, file pages(and swaps) in the range mmapped by the task | |
| | will be moved even if the task hasn't done page fault, i.e. they might | |
| | not be the task's "RSS", but other task's "RSS" that maps the same file. | |
| | And mapcount of the page is ignored(the page can be moved even if | |
| | page_mapcount(page) > 1). You must enable Swap Extension(see 2.4) to | |
| | enable move of swap charges. | |
| 8.3 TODO | |
| - Implement madvise(2) to let users decide the vma to be moved or not to be | |
| moved. | |
| - All of moving charge operations are done under cgroup_mutex. It's not good | |
| behavior to hold the mutex too long, so we may need some trick. | |
| 9. Memory thresholds | |
| Memory cgroup implements memory thresholds using cgroups notification | |
| API (see cgroups.txt). It allows to register multiple memory and memsw | |
| thresholds and gets notifications when it crosses. | |
| To register a threshold application need: | |
| - create an eventfd using eventfd(2); | |
| - open memory.usage_in_bytes or memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes; | |
| - write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.usage_in_bytes> <threshold>" to | |
| cgroup.event_control. | |
| Application will be notified through eventfd when memory usage crosses | |
| threshold in any direction. | |
| It's applicable for root and non-root cgroup. | |
| 10. OOM Control | |
| memory.oom_control file is for OOM notification and other controls. | |
| Memory cgroup implements OOM notifier using cgroup notification | |
| API (See cgroups.txt). It allows to register multiple OOM notification | |
| delivery and gets notification when OOM happens. | |
| To register a notifier, application need: | |
| - create an eventfd using eventfd(2) | |
| - open memory.oom_control file | |
| - write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.oom_control>" to | |
| cgroup.event_control | |
| Application will be notified through eventfd when OOM happens. | |
| OOM notification doesn't work for root cgroup. | |
| You can disable OOM-killer by writing "1" to memory.oom_control file, as: | |
| #echo 1 > memory.oom_control | |
| This operation is only allowed to the top cgroup of sub-hierarchy. | |
| If OOM-killer is disabled, tasks under cgroup will hang/sleep | |
| in memory cgroup's OOM-waitqueue when they request accountable memory. | |
| For running them, you have to relax the memory cgroup's OOM status by | |
| * enlarge limit or reduce usage. | |
| To reduce usage, | |
| * kill some tasks. | |
| * move some tasks to other group with account migration. | |
| * remove some files (on tmpfs?) | |
| Then, stopped tasks will work again. | |
| At reading, current status of OOM is shown. | |
| oom_kill_disable 0 or 1 (if 1, oom-killer is disabled) | |
| under_oom 0 or 1 (if 1, the memory cgroup is under OOM, tasks may | |
| be stopped.) | |
| 11. TODO | |
| 1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller) | |
| 2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first | |
| 3. Teach controller to account for shared-pages | |
| 4. Start reclamation in the background when the limit is | |
| not yet hit but the usage is getting closer | |
| Summary | |
| Overall, the memory controller has been a stable controller and has been | |
| commented and discussed quite extensively in the community. | |
| References | |
| 1. Singh, Balbir. RFC: Memory Controller, http://lwn.net/Articles/206697/ | |
| 2. Singh, Balbir. Memory Controller (RSS Control), | |
| http://lwn.net/Articles/222762/ | |
| 3. Emelianov, Pavel. Resource controllers based on process cgroups | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/3/6/198 | |
| 4. Emelianov, Pavel. RSS controller based on process cgroups (v2) | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/4/9/78 | |
| 5. Emelianov, Pavel. RSS controller based on process cgroups (v3) | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/30/244 | |
| 6. Menage, Paul. Control Groups v10, http://lwn.net/Articles/236032/ | |
| 7. Vaidyanathan, Srinivasan, Control Groups: Pagecache accounting and control | |
| subsystem (v3), http://lwn.net/Articles/235534/ | |
| 8. Singh, Balbir. RSS controller v2 test results (lmbench), | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/17/232 | |
| 9. Singh, Balbir. RSS controller v2 AIM9 results | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/18/1 | |
| 10. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller v6 test results, | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/19/36 | |
| 11. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller introduction (v6), | |
| http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/69 | |
| 12. Corbet, Jonathan, Controlling memory use in cgroups, | |
| http://lwn.net/Articles/243795/ |