memory.txt 27 KB

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  1. Memory Resource Controller
  2. NOTE: The Memory Resource Controller has been generically been referred
  3. to as the memory controller in this document. Do not confuse memory
  4. controller used here with the memory controller that is used in hardware.
  5. (For editors)
  6. In this document:
  7. When we mention a cgroup (cgroupfs's directory) with memory controller,
  8. we call it "memory cgroup". When you see git-log and source code, you'll
  9. see patch's title and function names tend to use "memcg".
  10. In this document, we avoid using it.
  11. Benefits and Purpose of the memory controller
  12. The memory controller isolates the memory behaviour of a group of tasks
  13. from the rest of the system. The article on LWN [12] mentions some probable
  14. uses of the memory controller. The memory controller can be used to
  15. a. Isolate an application or a group of applications
  16. Memory hungry applications can be isolated and limited to a smaller
  17. amount of memory.
  18. b. Create a cgroup with limited amount of memory, this can be used
  19. as a good alternative to booting with mem=XXXX.
  20. c. Virtualization solutions can control the amount of memory they want
  21. to assign to a virtual machine instance.
  22. d. A CD/DVD burner could control the amount of memory used by the
  23. rest of the system to ensure that burning does not fail due to lack
  24. of available memory.
  25. e. There are several other use cases, find one or use the controller just
  26. for fun (to learn and hack on the VM subsystem).
  27. Current Status: linux-2.6.34-mmotm(development version of 2010/April)
  28. Features:
  29. - accounting anonymous pages, file caches, swap caches usage and limiting them.
  30. - private LRU and reclaim routine. (system's global LRU and private LRU
  31. work independently from each other)
  32. - optionally, memory+swap usage can be accounted and limited.
  33. - hierarchical accounting
  34. - soft limit
  35. - moving(recharging) account at moving a task is selectable.
  36. - usage threshold notifier
  37. - oom-killer disable knob and oom-notifier
  38. - Root cgroup has no limit controls.
  39. Kernel memory and Hugepages are not under control yet. We just manage
  40. pages on LRU. To add more controls, we have to take care of performance.
  41. Brief summary of control files.
  42. tasks # attach a task(thread) and show list of threads
  43. cgroup.procs # show list of processes
  44. cgroup.event_control # an interface for event_fd()
  45. memory.usage_in_bytes # show current memory(RSS+Cache) usage.
  46. memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes # show current memory+Swap usage
  47. memory.limit_in_bytes # set/show limit of memory usage
  48. memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes # set/show limit of memory+Swap usage
  49. memory.failcnt # show the number of memory usage hits limits
  50. memory.memsw.failcnt # show the number of memory+Swap hits limits
  51. memory.max_usage_in_bytes # show max memory usage recorded
  52. memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes # show max memory+Swap usage recorded
  53. memory.soft_limit_in_bytes # set/show soft limit of memory usage
  54. memory.stat # show various statistics
  55. memory.use_hierarchy # set/show hierarchical account enabled
  56. memory.force_empty # trigger forced move charge to parent
  57. memory.swappiness # set/show swappiness parameter of vmscan
  58. (See sysctl's vm.swappiness)
  59. memory.move_charge_at_immigrate # set/show controls of moving charges
  60. memory.oom_control # set/show oom controls.
  61. 1. History
  62. The memory controller has a long history. A request for comments for the memory
  63. controller was posted by Balbir Singh [1]. At the time the RFC was posted
  64. there were several implementations for memory control. The goal of the
  65. RFC was to build consensus and agreement for the minimal features required
  66. for memory control. The first RSS controller was posted by Balbir Singh[2]
  67. in Feb 2007. Pavel Emelianov [3][4][5] has since posted three versions of the
  68. RSS controller. At OLS, at the resource management BoF, everyone suggested
  69. that we handle both page cache and RSS together. Another request was raised
  70. to allow user space handling of OOM. The current memory controller is
  71. at version 6; it combines both mapped (RSS) and unmapped Page
  72. Cache Control [11].
  73. 2. Memory Control
  74. Memory is a unique resource in the sense that it is present in a limited
  75. amount. If a task requires a lot of CPU processing, the task can spread
  76. its processing over a period of hours, days, months or years, but with
  77. memory, the same physical memory needs to be reused to accomplish the task.
  78. The memory controller implementation has been divided into phases. These
  79. are:
  80. 1. Memory controller
  81. 2. mlock(2) controller
  82. 3. Kernel user memory accounting and slab control
  83. 4. user mappings length controller
  84. The memory controller is the first controller developed.
  85. 2.1. Design
  86. The core of the design is a counter called the res_counter. The res_counter
  87. tracks the current memory usage and limit of the group of processes associated
  88. with the controller. Each cgroup has a memory controller specific data
  89. structure (mem_cgroup) associated with it.
  90. 2.2. Accounting
  91. +--------------------+
  92. | mem_cgroup |
  93. | (res_counter) |
  94. +--------------------+
  95. / ^ \
  96. / | \
  97. +---------------+ | +---------------+
  98. | mm_struct | |.... | mm_struct |
  99. | | | | |
  100. +---------------+ | +---------------+
  101. |
  102. + --------------+
  103. |
  104. +---------------+ +------+--------+
  105. | page +----------> page_cgroup|
  106. | | | |
  107. +---------------+ +---------------+
  108. (Figure 1: Hierarchy of Accounting)
  109. Figure 1 shows the important aspects of the controller
  110. 1. Accounting happens per cgroup
  111. 2. Each mm_struct knows about which cgroup it belongs to
  112. 3. Each page has a pointer to the page_cgroup, which in turn knows the
  113. cgroup it belongs to
  114. The accounting is done as follows: mem_cgroup_charge() is invoked to setup
  115. the necessary data structures and check if the cgroup that is being charged
  116. is over its limit. If it is then reclaim is invoked on the cgroup.
  117. More details can be found in the reclaim section of this document.
  118. If everything goes well, a page meta-data-structure called page_cgroup is
  119. updated. page_cgroup has its own LRU on cgroup.
  120. (*) page_cgroup structure is allocated at boot/memory-hotplug time.
  121. 2.2.1 Accounting details
  122. All mapped anon pages (RSS) and cache pages (Page Cache) are accounted.
  123. Some pages which are never reclaimable and will not be on the global LRU
  124. are not accounted. We just account pages under usual VM management.
  125. RSS pages are accounted at page_fault unless they've already been accounted
  126. for earlier. A file page will be accounted for as Page Cache when it's
  127. inserted into inode (radix-tree). While it's mapped into the page tables of
  128. processes, duplicate accounting is carefully avoided.
  129. A RSS page is unaccounted when it's fully unmapped. A PageCache page is
  130. unaccounted when it's removed from radix-tree. Even if RSS pages are fully
  131. unmapped (by kswapd), they may exist as SwapCache in the system until they
  132. are really freed. Such SwapCaches also also accounted.
  133. A swapped-in page is not accounted until it's mapped.
  134. Note: The kernel does swapin-readahead and read multiple swaps at once.
  135. This means swapped-in pages may contain pages for other tasks than a task
  136. causing page fault. So, we avoid accounting at swap-in I/O.
  137. At page migration, accounting information is kept.
  138. Note: we just account pages-on-LRU because our purpose is to control amount
  139. of used pages; not-on-LRU pages tend to be out-of-control from VM view.
  140. 2.3 Shared Page Accounting
  141. Shared pages are accounted on the basis of the first touch approach. The
  142. cgroup that first touches a page is accounted for the page. The principle
  143. behind this approach is that a cgroup that aggressively uses a shared
  144. page will eventually get charged for it (once it is uncharged from
  145. the cgroup that brought it in -- this will happen on memory pressure).
  146. Exception: If CONFIG_CGROUP_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP is not used..
  147. When you do swapoff and make swapped-out pages of shmem(tmpfs) to
  148. be backed into memory in force, charges for pages are accounted against the
  149. caller of swapoff rather than the users of shmem.
  150. 2.4 Swap Extension (CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP)
  151. Swap Extension allows you to record charge for swap. A swapped-in page is
  152. charged back to original page allocator if possible.
  153. When swap is accounted, following files are added.
  154. - memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes.
  155. - memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes.
  156. memsw means memory+swap. Usage of memory+swap is limited by
  157. memsw.limit_in_bytes.
  158. Example: Assume a system with 4G of swap. A task which allocates 6G of memory
  159. (by mistake) under 2G memory limitation will use all swap.
  160. In this case, setting memsw.limit_in_bytes=3G will prevent bad use of swap.
  161. By using memsw limit, you can avoid system OOM which can be caused by swap
  162. shortage.
  163. * why 'memory+swap' rather than swap.
  164. The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means
  165. to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of
  166. memory+swap. In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without
  167. affecting global LRU, memory+swap limit is better than just limiting swap from
  168. OS point of view.
  169. * What happens when a cgroup hits memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes
  170. When a cgroup his memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes, it's useless to do swap-out
  171. in this cgroup. Then, swap-out will not be done by cgroup routine and file
  172. caches are dropped. But as mentioned above, global LRU can do swapout memory
  173. from it for sanity of the system's memory management state. You can't forbid
  174. it by cgroup.
  175. 2.5 Reclaim
  176. Each cgroup maintains a per cgroup LRU which has the same structure as
  177. global VM. When a cgroup goes over its limit, we first try
  178. to reclaim memory from the cgroup so as to make space for the new
  179. pages that the cgroup has touched. If the reclaim is unsuccessful,
  180. an OOM routine is invoked to select and kill the bulkiest task in the
  181. cgroup. (See 10. OOM Control below.)
  182. The reclaim algorithm has not been modified for cgroups, except that
  183. pages that are selected for reclaiming come from the per cgroup LRU
  184. list.
  185. NOTE: Reclaim does not work for the root cgroup, since we cannot set any
  186. limits on the root cgroup.
  187. Note2: When panic_on_oom is set to "2", the whole system will panic.
  188. When oom event notifier is registered, event will be delivered.
  189. (See oom_control section)
  190. 2.6 Locking
  191. lock_page_cgroup()/unlock_page_cgroup() should not be called under
  192. mapping->tree_lock.
  193. Other lock order is following:
  194. PG_locked.
  195. mm->page_table_lock
  196. zone->lru_lock
  197. lock_page_cgroup.
  198. In many cases, just lock_page_cgroup() is called.
  199. per-zone-per-cgroup LRU (cgroup's private LRU) is just guarded by
  200. zone->lru_lock, it has no lock of its own.
  201. 3. User Interface
  202. 0. Configuration
  203. a. Enable CONFIG_CGROUPS
  204. b. Enable CONFIG_RESOURCE_COUNTERS
  205. c. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR
  206. d. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP (to use swap extension)
  207. 1. Prepare the cgroups
  208. # mkdir -p /cgroups
  209. # mount -t cgroup none /cgroups -o memory
  210. 2. Make the new group and move bash into it
  211. # mkdir /cgroups/0
  212. # echo $$ > /cgroups/0/tasks
  213. Since now we're in the 0 cgroup, we can alter the memory limit:
  214. # echo 4M > /cgroups/0/memory.limit_in_bytes
  215. NOTE: We can use a suffix (k, K, m, M, g or G) to indicate values in kilo,
  216. mega or gigabytes. (Here, Kilo, Mega, Giga are Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes.)
  217. NOTE: We can write "-1" to reset the *.limit_in_bytes(unlimited).
  218. NOTE: We cannot set limits on the root cgroup any more.
  219. # cat /cgroups/0/memory.limit_in_bytes
  220. 4194304
  221. We can check the usage:
  222. # cat /cgroups/0/memory.usage_in_bytes
  223. 1216512
  224. A successful write to this file does not guarantee a successful set of
  225. this limit to the value written into the file. This can be due to a
  226. number of factors, such as rounding up to page boundaries or the total
  227. availability of memory on the system. The user is required to re-read
  228. this file after a write to guarantee the value committed by the kernel.
  229. # echo 1 > memory.limit_in_bytes
  230. # cat memory.limit_in_bytes
  231. 4096
  232. The memory.failcnt field gives the number of times that the cgroup limit was
  233. exceeded.
  234. The memory.stat file gives accounting information. Now, the number of
  235. caches, RSS and Active pages/Inactive pages are shown.
  236. 4. Testing
  237. For testing features and implementation, see memcg_test.txt.
  238. Performance test is also important. To see pure memory controller's overhead,
  239. testing on tmpfs will give you good numbers of small overheads.
  240. Example: do kernel make on tmpfs.
  241. Page-fault scalability is also important. At measuring parallel
  242. page fault test, multi-process test may be better than multi-thread
  243. test because it has noise of shared objects/status.
  244. But the above two are testing extreme situations.
  245. Trying usual test under memory controller is always helpful.
  246. 4.1 Troubleshooting
  247. Sometimes a user might find that the application under a cgroup is
  248. terminated by OOM killer. There are several causes for this:
  249. 1. The cgroup limit is too low (just too low to do anything useful)
  250. 2. The user is using anonymous memory and swap is turned off or too low
  251. A sync followed by echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches will help get rid of
  252. some of the pages cached in the cgroup (page cache pages).
  253. To know what happens, disable OOM_Kill by 10. OOM Control(see below) and
  254. seeing what happens will be helpful.
  255. 4.2 Task migration
  256. When a task migrates from one cgroup to another, its charge is not
  257. carried forward by default. The pages allocated from the original cgroup still
  258. remain charged to it, the charge is dropped when the page is freed or
  259. reclaimed.
  260. You can move charges of a task along with task migration.
  261. See 8. "Move charges at task migration"
  262. 4.3 Removing a cgroup
  263. A cgroup can be removed by rmdir, but as discussed in sections 4.1 and 4.2, a
  264. cgroup might have some charge associated with it, even though all
  265. tasks have migrated away from it. (because we charge against pages, not
  266. against tasks.)
  267. Such charges are freed or moved to their parent. At moving, both of RSS
  268. and CACHES are moved to parent.
  269. rmdir() may return -EBUSY if freeing/moving fails. See 5.1 also.
  270. Charges recorded in swap information is not updated at removal of cgroup.
  271. Recorded information is discarded and a cgroup which uses swap (swapcache)
  272. will be charged as a new owner of it.
  273. 5. Misc. interfaces.
  274. 5.1 force_empty
  275. memory.force_empty interface is provided to make cgroup's memory usage empty.
  276. You can use this interface only when the cgroup has no tasks.
  277. When writing anything to this
  278. # echo 0 > memory.force_empty
  279. Almost all pages tracked by this memory cgroup will be unmapped and freed.
  280. Some pages cannot be freed because they are locked or in-use. Such pages are
  281. moved to parent and this cgroup will be empty. This may return -EBUSY if
  282. VM is too busy to free/move all pages immediately.
  283. Typical use case of this interface is that calling this before rmdir().
  284. Because rmdir() moves all pages to parent, some out-of-use page caches can be
  285. moved to the parent. If you want to avoid that, force_empty will be useful.
  286. 5.2 stat file
  287. memory.stat file includes following statistics
  288. # per-memory cgroup local status
  289. cache - # of bytes of page cache memory.
  290. rss - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory.
  291. mapped_file - # of bytes of mapped file (includes tmpfs/shmem)
  292. pgpgin - # of pages paged in (equivalent to # of charging events).
  293. pgpgout - # of pages paged out (equivalent to # of uncharging events).
  294. swap - # of bytes of swap usage
  295. inactive_anon - # of bytes of anonymous memory and swap cache memory on
  296. LRU list.
  297. active_anon - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory on active
  298. inactive LRU list.
  299. inactive_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on inactive LRU list.
  300. active_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on active LRU list.
  301. unevictable - # of bytes of memory that cannot be reclaimed (mlocked etc).
  302. # status considering hierarchy (see memory.use_hierarchy settings)
  303. hierarchical_memory_limit - # of bytes of memory limit with regard to hierarchy
  304. under which the memory cgroup is
  305. hierarchical_memsw_limit - # of bytes of memory+swap limit with regard to
  306. hierarchy under which memory cgroup is.
  307. total_cache - sum of all children's "cache"
  308. total_rss - sum of all children's "rss"
  309. total_mapped_file - sum of all children's "cache"
  310. total_pgpgin - sum of all children's "pgpgin"
  311. total_pgpgout - sum of all children's "pgpgout"
  312. total_swap - sum of all children's "swap"
  313. total_inactive_anon - sum of all children's "inactive_anon"
  314. total_active_anon - sum of all children's "active_anon"
  315. total_inactive_file - sum of all children's "inactive_file"
  316. total_active_file - sum of all children's "active_file"
  317. total_unevictable - sum of all children's "unevictable"
  318. # The following additional stats are dependent on CONFIG_DEBUG_VM.
  319. inactive_ratio - VM internal parameter. (see mm/page_alloc.c)
  320. recent_rotated_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  321. recent_rotated_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  322. recent_scanned_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  323. recent_scanned_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  324. Memo:
  325. recent_rotated means recent frequency of LRU rotation.
  326. recent_scanned means recent # of scans to LRU.
  327. showing for better debug please see the code for meanings.
  328. Note:
  329. Only anonymous and swap cache memory is listed as part of 'rss' stat.
  330. This should not be confused with the true 'resident set size' or the
  331. amount of physical memory used by the cgroup.
  332. 'rss + file_mapped" will give you resident set size of cgroup.
  333. (Note: file and shmem may be shared among other cgroups. In that case,
  334. file_mapped is accounted only when the memory cgroup is owner of page
  335. cache.)
  336. 5.3 swappiness
  337. Similar to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but affecting a hierarchy of groups only.
  338. Following cgroups' swappiness can't be changed.
  339. - root cgroup (uses /proc/sys/vm/swappiness).
  340. - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and it has other cgroup(s) below it.
  341. - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and not the root of hierarchy.
  342. 5.4 failcnt
  343. A memory cgroup provides memory.failcnt and memory.memsw.failcnt files.
  344. This failcnt(== failure count) shows the number of times that a usage counter
  345. hit its limit. When a memory cgroup hits a limit, failcnt increases and
  346. memory under it will be reclaimed.
  347. You can reset failcnt by writing 0 to failcnt file.
  348. # echo 0 > .../memory.failcnt
  349. 6. Hierarchy support
  350. The memory controller supports a deep hierarchy and hierarchical accounting.
  351. The hierarchy is created by creating the appropriate cgroups in the
  352. cgroup filesystem. Consider for example, the following cgroup filesystem
  353. hierarchy
  354. root
  355. / | \
  356. / | \
  357. a b c
  358. | \
  359. | \
  360. d e
  361. In the diagram above, with hierarchical accounting enabled, all memory
  362. usage of e, is accounted to its ancestors up until the root (i.e, c and root),
  363. that has memory.use_hierarchy enabled. If one of the ancestors goes over its
  364. limit, the reclaim algorithm reclaims from the tasks in the ancestor and the
  365. children of the ancestor.
  366. 6.1 Enabling hierarchical accounting and reclaim
  367. A memory cgroup by default disables the hierarchy feature. Support
  368. can be enabled by writing 1 to memory.use_hierarchy file of the root cgroup
  369. # echo 1 > memory.use_hierarchy
  370. The feature can be disabled by
  371. # echo 0 > memory.use_hierarchy
  372. NOTE1: Enabling/disabling will fail if either the cgroup already has other
  373. cgroups created below it, or if the parent cgroup has use_hierarchy
  374. enabled.
  375. NOTE2: When panic_on_oom is set to "2", the whole system will panic in
  376. case of an OOM event in any cgroup.
  377. 7. Soft limits
  378. Soft limits allow for greater sharing of memory. The idea behind soft limits
  379. is to allow control groups to use as much of the memory as needed, provided
  380. a. There is no memory contention
  381. b. They do not exceed their hard limit
  382. When the system detects memory contention or low memory, control groups
  383. are pushed back to their soft limits. If the soft limit of each control
  384. group is very high, they are pushed back as much as possible to make
  385. sure that one control group does not starve the others of memory.
  386. Please note that soft limits is a best effort feature, it comes with
  387. no guarantees, but it does its best to make sure that when memory is
  388. heavily contended for, memory is allocated based on the soft limit
  389. hints/setup. Currently soft limit based reclaim is setup such that
  390. it gets invoked from balance_pgdat (kswapd).
  391. 7.1 Interface
  392. Soft limits can be setup by using the following commands (in this example we
  393. assume a soft limit of 256 MiB)
  394. # echo 256M > memory.soft_limit_in_bytes
  395. If we want to change this to 1G, we can at any time use
  396. # echo 1G > memory.soft_limit_in_bytes
  397. NOTE1: Soft limits take effect over a long period of time, since they involve
  398. reclaiming memory for balancing between memory cgroups
  399. NOTE2: It is recommended to set the soft limit always below the hard limit,
  400. otherwise the hard limit will take precedence.
  401. 8. Move charges at task migration
  402. Users can move charges associated with a task along with task migration, that
  403. is, uncharge task's pages from the old cgroup and charge them to the new cgroup.
  404. This feature is not supported in !CONFIG_MMU environments because of lack of
  405. page tables.
  406. 8.1 Interface
  407. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled(and disabled again) by
  408. writing to memory.move_charge_at_immigrate of the destination cgroup.
  409. If you want to enable it:
  410. # echo (some positive value) > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate
  411. Note: Each bits of move_charge_at_immigrate has its own meaning about what type
  412. of charges should be moved. See 8.2 for details.
  413. Note: Charges are moved only when you move mm->owner, IOW, a leader of a thread
  414. group.
  415. Note: If we cannot find enough space for the task in the destination cgroup, we
  416. try to make space by reclaiming memory. Task migration may fail if we
  417. cannot make enough space.
  418. Note: It can take several seconds if you move charges much.
  419. And if you want disable it again:
  420. # echo 0 > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate
  421. 8.2 Type of charges which can be move
  422. Each bits of move_charge_at_immigrate has its own meaning about what type of
  423. charges should be moved. But in any cases, it must be noted that an account of
  424. a page or a swap can be moved only when it is charged to the task's current(old)
  425. memory cgroup.
  426. bit | what type of charges would be moved ?
  427. -----+------------------------------------------------------------------------
  428. 0 | A charge of an anonymous page(or swap of it) used by the target task.
  429. | Those pages and swaps must be used only by the target task. You must
  430. | enable Swap Extension(see 2.4) to enable move of swap charges.
  431. -----+------------------------------------------------------------------------
  432. 1 | A charge of file pages(normal file, tmpfs file(e.g. ipc shared memory)
  433. | and swaps of tmpfs file) mmapped by the target task. Unlike the case of
  434. | anonymous pages, file pages(and swaps) in the range mmapped by the task
  435. | will be moved even if the task hasn't done page fault, i.e. they might
  436. | not be the task's "RSS", but other task's "RSS" that maps the same file.
  437. | And mapcount of the page is ignored(the page can be moved even if
  438. | page_mapcount(page) > 1). You must enable Swap Extension(see 2.4) to
  439. | enable move of swap charges.
  440. 8.3 TODO
  441. - Implement madvise(2) to let users decide the vma to be moved or not to be
  442. moved.
  443. - All of moving charge operations are done under cgroup_mutex. It's not good
  444. behavior to hold the mutex too long, so we may need some trick.
  445. 9. Memory thresholds
  446. Memory cgroup implements memory thresholds using cgroups notification
  447. API (see cgroups.txt). It allows to register multiple memory and memsw
  448. thresholds and gets notifications when it crosses.
  449. To register a threshold application need:
  450. - create an eventfd using eventfd(2);
  451. - open memory.usage_in_bytes or memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes;
  452. - write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.usage_in_bytes> <threshold>" to
  453. cgroup.event_control.
  454. Application will be notified through eventfd when memory usage crosses
  455. threshold in any direction.
  456. It's applicable for root and non-root cgroup.
  457. 10. OOM Control
  458. memory.oom_control file is for OOM notification and other controls.
  459. Memory cgroup implements OOM notifier using cgroup notification
  460. API (See cgroups.txt). It allows to register multiple OOM notification
  461. delivery and gets notification when OOM happens.
  462. To register a notifier, application need:
  463. - create an eventfd using eventfd(2)
  464. - open memory.oom_control file
  465. - write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.oom_control>" to
  466. cgroup.event_control
  467. Application will be notified through eventfd when OOM happens.
  468. OOM notification doesn't work for root cgroup.
  469. You can disable OOM-killer by writing "1" to memory.oom_control file, as:
  470. #echo 1 > memory.oom_control
  471. This operation is only allowed to the top cgroup of sub-hierarchy.
  472. If OOM-killer is disabled, tasks under cgroup will hang/sleep
  473. in memory cgroup's OOM-waitqueue when they request accountable memory.
  474. For running them, you have to relax the memory cgroup's OOM status by
  475. * enlarge limit or reduce usage.
  476. To reduce usage,
  477. * kill some tasks.
  478. * move some tasks to other group with account migration.
  479. * remove some files (on tmpfs?)
  480. Then, stopped tasks will work again.
  481. At reading, current status of OOM is shown.
  482. oom_kill_disable 0 or 1 (if 1, oom-killer is disabled)
  483. under_oom 0 or 1 (if 1, the memory cgroup is under OOM, tasks may
  484. be stopped.)
  485. 11. TODO
  486. 1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller)
  487. 2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first
  488. 3. Teach controller to account for shared-pages
  489. 4. Start reclamation in the background when the limit is
  490. not yet hit but the usage is getting closer
  491. Summary
  492. Overall, the memory controller has been a stable controller and has been
  493. commented and discussed quite extensively in the community.
  494. References
  495. 1. Singh, Balbir. RFC: Memory Controller, http://lwn.net/Articles/206697/
  496. 2. Singh, Balbir. Memory Controller (RSS Control),
  497. http://lwn.net/Articles/222762/
  498. 3. Emelianov, Pavel. Resource controllers based on process cgroups
  499. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/3/6/198
  500. 4. Emelianov, Pavel. RSS controller based on process cgroups (v2)
  501. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/4/9/78
  502. 5. Emelianov, Pavel. RSS controller based on process cgroups (v3)
  503. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/30/244
  504. 6. Menage, Paul. Control Groups v10, http://lwn.net/Articles/236032/
  505. 7. Vaidyanathan, Srinivasan, Control Groups: Pagecache accounting and control
  506. subsystem (v3), http://lwn.net/Articles/235534/
  507. 8. Singh, Balbir. RSS controller v2 test results (lmbench),
  508. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/17/232
  509. 9. Singh, Balbir. RSS controller v2 AIM9 results
  510. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/18/1
  511. 10. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller v6 test results,
  512. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/19/36
  513. 11. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller introduction (v6),
  514. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/69
  515. 12. Corbet, Jonathan, Controlling memory use in cgroups,
  516. http://lwn.net/Articles/243795/