memory.txt 29 KB

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  1. Memory Resource Controller
  2. NOTE: The Memory Resource Controller has generically been referred to as the
  3. memory controller in this document. Do not confuse memory controller
  4. 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 support is work in progress, and the current version provides
  40. basically functionality. (See Section 2.7)
  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 res_counter usage for memory
  46. (See 5.5 for details)
  47. memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes # show current res_counter usage for memory+Swap
  48. (See 5.5 for details)
  49. memory.limit_in_bytes # set/show limit of memory usage
  50. memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes # set/show limit of memory+Swap usage
  51. memory.failcnt # show the number of memory usage hits limits
  52. memory.memsw.failcnt # show the number of memory+Swap hits limits
  53. memory.max_usage_in_bytes # show max memory usage recorded
  54. memory.memsw.max_usage_in_bytes # show max memory+Swap usage recorded
  55. memory.soft_limit_in_bytes # set/show soft limit of memory usage
  56. memory.stat # show various statistics
  57. memory.use_hierarchy # set/show hierarchical account enabled
  58. memory.force_empty # trigger forced move charge to parent
  59. memory.swappiness # set/show swappiness parameter of vmscan
  60. (See sysctl's vm.swappiness)
  61. memory.move_charge_at_immigrate # set/show controls of moving charges
  62. memory.oom_control # set/show oom controls.
  63. memory.numa_stat # show the number of memory usage per numa node
  64. memory.kmem.tcp.limit_in_bytes # set/show hard limit for tcp buf memory
  65. memory.kmem.tcp.usage_in_bytes # show current tcp buf memory allocation
  66. 1. History
  67. The memory controller has a long history. A request for comments for the memory
  68. controller was posted by Balbir Singh [1]. At the time the RFC was posted
  69. there were several implementations for memory control. The goal of the
  70. RFC was to build consensus and agreement for the minimal features required
  71. for memory control. The first RSS controller was posted by Balbir Singh[2]
  72. in Feb 2007. Pavel Emelianov [3][4][5] has since posted three versions of the
  73. RSS controller. At OLS, at the resource management BoF, everyone suggested
  74. that we handle both page cache and RSS together. Another request was raised
  75. to allow user space handling of OOM. The current memory controller is
  76. at version 6; it combines both mapped (RSS) and unmapped Page
  77. Cache Control [11].
  78. 2. Memory Control
  79. Memory is a unique resource in the sense that it is present in a limited
  80. amount. If a task requires a lot of CPU processing, the task can spread
  81. its processing over a period of hours, days, months or years, but with
  82. memory, the same physical memory needs to be reused to accomplish the task.
  83. The memory controller implementation has been divided into phases. These
  84. are:
  85. 1. Memory controller
  86. 2. mlock(2) controller
  87. 3. Kernel user memory accounting and slab control
  88. 4. user mappings length controller
  89. The memory controller is the first controller developed.
  90. 2.1. Design
  91. The core of the design is a counter called the res_counter. The res_counter
  92. tracks the current memory usage and limit of the group of processes associated
  93. with the controller. Each cgroup has a memory controller specific data
  94. structure (mem_cgroup) associated with it.
  95. 2.2. Accounting
  96. +--------------------+
  97. | mem_cgroup |
  98. | (res_counter) |
  99. +--------------------+
  100. / ^ \
  101. / | \
  102. +---------------+ | +---------------+
  103. | mm_struct | |.... | mm_struct |
  104. | | | | |
  105. +---------------+ | +---------------+
  106. |
  107. + --------------+
  108. |
  109. +---------------+ +------+--------+
  110. | page +----------> page_cgroup|
  111. | | | |
  112. +---------------+ +---------------+
  113. (Figure 1: Hierarchy of Accounting)
  114. Figure 1 shows the important aspects of the controller
  115. 1. Accounting happens per cgroup
  116. 2. Each mm_struct knows about which cgroup it belongs to
  117. 3. Each page has a pointer to the page_cgroup, which in turn knows the
  118. cgroup it belongs to
  119. The accounting is done as follows: mem_cgroup_charge() is invoked to setup
  120. the necessary data structures and check if the cgroup that is being charged
  121. is over its limit. If it is then reclaim is invoked on the cgroup.
  122. More details can be found in the reclaim section of this document.
  123. If everything goes well, a page meta-data-structure called page_cgroup is
  124. updated. page_cgroup has its own LRU on cgroup.
  125. (*) page_cgroup structure is allocated at boot/memory-hotplug time.
  126. 2.2.1 Accounting details
  127. All mapped anon pages (RSS) and cache pages (Page Cache) are accounted.
  128. Some pages which are never reclaimable and will not be on the global LRU
  129. are not accounted. We just account pages under usual VM management.
  130. RSS pages are accounted at page_fault unless they've already been accounted
  131. for earlier. A file page will be accounted for as Page Cache when it's
  132. inserted into inode (radix-tree). While it's mapped into the page tables of
  133. processes, duplicate accounting is carefully avoided.
  134. A RSS page is unaccounted when it's fully unmapped. A PageCache page is
  135. unaccounted when it's removed from radix-tree. Even if RSS pages are fully
  136. unmapped (by kswapd), they may exist as SwapCache in the system until they
  137. are really freed. Such SwapCaches also also accounted.
  138. A swapped-in page is not accounted until it's mapped.
  139. Note: The kernel does swapin-readahead and read multiple swaps at once.
  140. This means swapped-in pages may contain pages for other tasks than a task
  141. causing page fault. So, we avoid accounting at swap-in I/O.
  142. At page migration, accounting information is kept.
  143. Note: we just account pages-on-LRU because our purpose is to control amount
  144. of used pages; not-on-LRU pages tend to be out-of-control from VM view.
  145. 2.3 Shared Page Accounting
  146. Shared pages are accounted on the basis of the first touch approach. The
  147. cgroup that first touches a page is accounted for the page. The principle
  148. behind this approach is that a cgroup that aggressively uses a shared
  149. page will eventually get charged for it (once it is uncharged from
  150. the cgroup that brought it in -- this will happen on memory pressure).
  151. Exception: If CONFIG_CGROUP_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP is not used.
  152. When you do swapoff and make swapped-out pages of shmem(tmpfs) to
  153. be backed into memory in force, charges for pages are accounted against the
  154. caller of swapoff rather than the users of shmem.
  155. 2.4 Swap Extension (CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP)
  156. Swap Extension allows you to record charge for swap. A swapped-in page is
  157. charged back to original page allocator if possible.
  158. When swap is accounted, following files are added.
  159. - memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes.
  160. - memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes.
  161. memsw means memory+swap. Usage of memory+swap is limited by
  162. memsw.limit_in_bytes.
  163. Example: Assume a system with 4G of swap. A task which allocates 6G of memory
  164. (by mistake) under 2G memory limitation will use all swap.
  165. In this case, setting memsw.limit_in_bytes=3G will prevent bad use of swap.
  166. By using memsw limit, you can avoid system OOM which can be caused by swap
  167. shortage.
  168. * why 'memory+swap' rather than swap.
  169. The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means
  170. to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of
  171. memory+swap. In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without
  172. affecting global LRU, memory+swap limit is better than just limiting swap from
  173. OS point of view.
  174. * What happens when a cgroup hits memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes
  175. When a cgroup hits memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes, it's useless to do swap-out
  176. in this cgroup. Then, swap-out will not be done by cgroup routine and file
  177. caches are dropped. But as mentioned above, global LRU can do swapout memory
  178. from it for sanity of the system's memory management state. You can't forbid
  179. it by cgroup.
  180. 2.5 Reclaim
  181. Each cgroup maintains a per cgroup LRU which has the same structure as
  182. global VM. When a cgroup goes over its limit, we first try
  183. to reclaim memory from the cgroup so as to make space for the new
  184. pages that the cgroup has touched. If the reclaim is unsuccessful,
  185. an OOM routine is invoked to select and kill the bulkiest task in the
  186. cgroup. (See 10. OOM Control below.)
  187. The reclaim algorithm has not been modified for cgroups, except that
  188. pages that are selected for reclaiming come from the per cgroup LRU
  189. list.
  190. NOTE: Reclaim does not work for the root cgroup, since we cannot set any
  191. limits on the root cgroup.
  192. Note2: When panic_on_oom is set to "2", the whole system will panic.
  193. When oom event notifier is registered, event will be delivered.
  194. (See oom_control section)
  195. 2.6 Locking
  196. lock_page_cgroup()/unlock_page_cgroup() should not be called under
  197. mapping->tree_lock.
  198. Other lock order is following:
  199. PG_locked.
  200. mm->page_table_lock
  201. zone->lru_lock
  202. lock_page_cgroup.
  203. In many cases, just lock_page_cgroup() is called.
  204. per-zone-per-cgroup LRU (cgroup's private LRU) is just guarded by
  205. zone->lru_lock, it has no lock of its own.
  206. 2.7 Kernel Memory Extension (CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_KMEM)
  207. With the Kernel memory extension, the Memory Controller is able to limit
  208. the amount of kernel memory used by the system. Kernel memory is fundamentally
  209. different than user memory, since it can't be swapped out, which makes it
  210. possible to DoS the system by consuming too much of this precious resource.
  211. Kernel memory limits are not imposed for the root cgroup. Usage for the root
  212. cgroup may or may not be accounted.
  213. Currently no soft limit is implemented for kernel memory. It is future work
  214. to trigger slab reclaim when those limits are reached.
  215. 2.7.1 Current Kernel Memory resources accounted
  216. * sockets memory pressure: some sockets protocols have memory pressure
  217. thresholds. The Memory Controller allows them to be controlled individually
  218. per cgroup, instead of globally.
  219. * tcp memory pressure: sockets memory pressure for the tcp protocol.
  220. 3. User Interface
  221. 0. Configuration
  222. a. Enable CONFIG_CGROUPS
  223. b. Enable CONFIG_RESOURCE_COUNTERS
  224. c. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR
  225. d. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP (to use swap extension)
  226. 1. Prepare the cgroups (see cgroups.txt, Why are cgroups needed?)
  227. # mount -t tmpfs none /sys/fs/cgroup
  228. # mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory
  229. # mount -t cgroup none /sys/fs/cgroup/memory -o memory
  230. 2. Make the new group and move bash into it
  231. # mkdir /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0
  232. # echo $$ > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/tasks
  233. Since now we're in the 0 cgroup, we can alter the memory limit:
  234. # echo 4M > /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/memory.limit_in_bytes
  235. NOTE: We can use a suffix (k, K, m, M, g or G) to indicate values in kilo,
  236. mega or gigabytes. (Here, Kilo, Mega, Giga are Kibibytes, Mebibytes, Gibibytes.)
  237. NOTE: We can write "-1" to reset the *.limit_in_bytes(unlimited).
  238. NOTE: We cannot set limits on the root cgroup any more.
  239. # cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/memory.limit_in_bytes
  240. 4194304
  241. We can check the usage:
  242. # cat /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/0/memory.usage_in_bytes
  243. 1216512
  244. A successful write to this file does not guarantee a successful set of
  245. this limit to the value written into the file. This can be due to a
  246. number of factors, such as rounding up to page boundaries or the total
  247. availability of memory on the system. The user is required to re-read
  248. this file after a write to guarantee the value committed by the kernel.
  249. # echo 1 > memory.limit_in_bytes
  250. # cat memory.limit_in_bytes
  251. 4096
  252. The memory.failcnt field gives the number of times that the cgroup limit was
  253. exceeded.
  254. The memory.stat file gives accounting information. Now, the number of
  255. caches, RSS and Active pages/Inactive pages are shown.
  256. 4. Testing
  257. For testing features and implementation, see memcg_test.txt.
  258. Performance test is also important. To see pure memory controller's overhead,
  259. testing on tmpfs will give you good numbers of small overheads.
  260. Example: do kernel make on tmpfs.
  261. Page-fault scalability is also important. At measuring parallel
  262. page fault test, multi-process test may be better than multi-thread
  263. test because it has noise of shared objects/status.
  264. But the above two are testing extreme situations.
  265. Trying usual test under memory controller is always helpful.
  266. 4.1 Troubleshooting
  267. Sometimes a user might find that the application under a cgroup is
  268. terminated by OOM killer. There are several causes for this:
  269. 1. The cgroup limit is too low (just too low to do anything useful)
  270. 2. The user is using anonymous memory and swap is turned off or too low
  271. A sync followed by echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches will help get rid of
  272. some of the pages cached in the cgroup (page cache pages).
  273. To know what happens, disable OOM_Kill by 10. OOM Control(see below) and
  274. seeing what happens will be helpful.
  275. 4.2 Task migration
  276. When a task migrates from one cgroup to another, its charge is not
  277. carried forward by default. The pages allocated from the original cgroup still
  278. remain charged to it, the charge is dropped when the page is freed or
  279. reclaimed.
  280. You can move charges of a task along with task migration.
  281. See 8. "Move charges at task migration"
  282. 4.3 Removing a cgroup
  283. A cgroup can be removed by rmdir, but as discussed in sections 4.1 and 4.2, a
  284. cgroup might have some charge associated with it, even though all
  285. tasks have migrated away from it. (because we charge against pages, not
  286. against tasks.)
  287. Such charges are freed or moved to their parent. At moving, both of RSS
  288. and CACHES are moved to parent.
  289. rmdir() may return -EBUSY if freeing/moving fails. See 5.1 also.
  290. Charges recorded in swap information is not updated at removal of cgroup.
  291. Recorded information is discarded and a cgroup which uses swap (swapcache)
  292. will be charged as a new owner of it.
  293. 5. Misc. interfaces.
  294. 5.1 force_empty
  295. memory.force_empty interface is provided to make cgroup's memory usage empty.
  296. You can use this interface only when the cgroup has no tasks.
  297. When writing anything to this
  298. # echo 0 > memory.force_empty
  299. Almost all pages tracked by this memory cgroup will be unmapped and freed.
  300. Some pages cannot be freed because they are locked or in-use. Such pages are
  301. moved to parent and this cgroup will be empty. This may return -EBUSY if
  302. VM is too busy to free/move all pages immediately.
  303. Typical use case of this interface is that calling this before rmdir().
  304. Because rmdir() moves all pages to parent, some out-of-use page caches can be
  305. moved to the parent. If you want to avoid that, force_empty will be useful.
  306. 5.2 stat file
  307. memory.stat file includes following statistics
  308. # per-memory cgroup local status
  309. cache - # of bytes of page cache memory.
  310. rss - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory.
  311. mapped_file - # of bytes of mapped file (includes tmpfs/shmem)
  312. pgpgin - # of pages paged in (equivalent to # of charging events).
  313. pgpgout - # of pages paged out (equivalent to # of uncharging events).
  314. swap - # of bytes of swap usage
  315. inactive_anon - # of bytes of anonymous memory and swap cache memory on
  316. LRU list.
  317. active_anon - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory on active
  318. inactive LRU list.
  319. inactive_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on inactive LRU list.
  320. active_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on active LRU list.
  321. unevictable - # of bytes of memory that cannot be reclaimed (mlocked etc).
  322. # status considering hierarchy (see memory.use_hierarchy settings)
  323. hierarchical_memory_limit - # of bytes of memory limit with regard to hierarchy
  324. under which the memory cgroup is
  325. hierarchical_memsw_limit - # of bytes of memory+swap limit with regard to
  326. hierarchy under which memory cgroup is.
  327. total_cache - sum of all children's "cache"
  328. total_rss - sum of all children's "rss"
  329. total_mapped_file - sum of all children's "cache"
  330. total_pgpgin - sum of all children's "pgpgin"
  331. total_pgpgout - sum of all children's "pgpgout"
  332. total_swap - sum of all children's "swap"
  333. total_inactive_anon - sum of all children's "inactive_anon"
  334. total_active_anon - sum of all children's "active_anon"
  335. total_inactive_file - sum of all children's "inactive_file"
  336. total_active_file - sum of all children's "active_file"
  337. total_unevictable - sum of all children's "unevictable"
  338. # The following additional stats are dependent on CONFIG_DEBUG_VM.
  339. recent_rotated_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  340. recent_rotated_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  341. recent_scanned_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  342. recent_scanned_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
  343. Memo:
  344. recent_rotated means recent frequency of LRU rotation.
  345. recent_scanned means recent # of scans to LRU.
  346. showing for better debug please see the code for meanings.
  347. Note:
  348. Only anonymous and swap cache memory is listed as part of 'rss' stat.
  349. This should not be confused with the true 'resident set size' or the
  350. amount of physical memory used by the cgroup.
  351. 'rss + file_mapped" will give you resident set size of cgroup.
  352. (Note: file and shmem may be shared among other cgroups. In that case,
  353. file_mapped is accounted only when the memory cgroup is owner of page
  354. cache.)
  355. 5.3 swappiness
  356. Similar to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but affecting a hierarchy of groups only.
  357. Following cgroups' swappiness can't be changed.
  358. - root cgroup (uses /proc/sys/vm/swappiness).
  359. - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and it has other cgroup(s) below it.
  360. - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and not the root of hierarchy.
  361. 5.4 failcnt
  362. A memory cgroup provides memory.failcnt and memory.memsw.failcnt files.
  363. This failcnt(== failure count) shows the number of times that a usage counter
  364. hit its limit. When a memory cgroup hits a limit, failcnt increases and
  365. memory under it will be reclaimed.
  366. You can reset failcnt by writing 0 to failcnt file.
  367. # echo 0 > .../memory.failcnt
  368. 5.5 usage_in_bytes
  369. For efficiency, as other kernel components, memory cgroup uses some optimization
  370. to avoid unnecessary cacheline false sharing. usage_in_bytes is affected by the
  371. method and doesn't show 'exact' value of memory(and swap) usage, it's an fuzz
  372. value for efficient access. (Of course, when necessary, it's synchronized.)
  373. If you want to know more exact memory usage, you should use RSS+CACHE(+SWAP)
  374. value in memory.stat(see 5.2).
  375. 5.6 numa_stat
  376. This is similar to numa_maps but operates on a per-memcg basis. This is
  377. useful for providing visibility into the numa locality information within
  378. an memcg since the pages are allowed to be allocated from any physical
  379. node. One of the usecases is evaluating application performance by
  380. combining this information with the application's cpu allocation.
  381. We export "total", "file", "anon" and "unevictable" pages per-node for
  382. each memcg. The ouput format of memory.numa_stat is:
  383. total=<total pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ...
  384. file=<total file pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ...
  385. anon=<total anon pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ...
  386. unevictable=<total anon pages> N0=<node 0 pages> N1=<node 1 pages> ...
  387. And we have total = file + anon + unevictable.
  388. 6. Hierarchy support
  389. The memory controller supports a deep hierarchy and hierarchical accounting.
  390. The hierarchy is created by creating the appropriate cgroups in the
  391. cgroup filesystem. Consider for example, the following cgroup filesystem
  392. hierarchy
  393. root
  394. / | \
  395. / | \
  396. a b c
  397. | \
  398. | \
  399. d e
  400. In the diagram above, with hierarchical accounting enabled, all memory
  401. usage of e, is accounted to its ancestors up until the root (i.e, c and root),
  402. that has memory.use_hierarchy enabled. If one of the ancestors goes over its
  403. limit, the reclaim algorithm reclaims from the tasks in the ancestor and the
  404. children of the ancestor.
  405. 6.1 Enabling hierarchical accounting and reclaim
  406. A memory cgroup by default disables the hierarchy feature. Support
  407. can be enabled by writing 1 to memory.use_hierarchy file of the root cgroup
  408. # echo 1 > memory.use_hierarchy
  409. The feature can be disabled by
  410. # echo 0 > memory.use_hierarchy
  411. NOTE1: Enabling/disabling will fail if either the cgroup already has other
  412. cgroups created below it, or if the parent cgroup has use_hierarchy
  413. enabled.
  414. NOTE2: When panic_on_oom is set to "2", the whole system will panic in
  415. case of an OOM event in any cgroup.
  416. 7. Soft limits
  417. Soft limits allow for greater sharing of memory. The idea behind soft limits
  418. is to allow control groups to use as much of the memory as needed, provided
  419. a. There is no memory contention
  420. b. They do not exceed their hard limit
  421. When the system detects memory contention or low memory, control groups
  422. are pushed back to their soft limits. If the soft limit of each control
  423. group is very high, they are pushed back as much as possible to make
  424. sure that one control group does not starve the others of memory.
  425. Please note that soft limits is a best effort feature, it comes with
  426. no guarantees, but it does its best to make sure that when memory is
  427. heavily contended for, memory is allocated based on the soft limit
  428. hints/setup. Currently soft limit based reclaim is setup such that
  429. it gets invoked from balance_pgdat (kswapd).
  430. 7.1 Interface
  431. Soft limits can be setup by using the following commands (in this example we
  432. assume a soft limit of 256 MiB)
  433. # echo 256M > memory.soft_limit_in_bytes
  434. If we want to change this to 1G, we can at any time use
  435. # echo 1G > memory.soft_limit_in_bytes
  436. NOTE1: Soft limits take effect over a long period of time, since they involve
  437. reclaiming memory for balancing between memory cgroups
  438. NOTE2: It is recommended to set the soft limit always below the hard limit,
  439. otherwise the hard limit will take precedence.
  440. 8. Move charges at task migration
  441. Users can move charges associated with a task along with task migration, that
  442. is, uncharge task's pages from the old cgroup and charge them to the new cgroup.
  443. This feature is not supported in !CONFIG_MMU environments because of lack of
  444. page tables.
  445. 8.1 Interface
  446. This feature is disabled by default. It can be enabled(and disabled again) by
  447. writing to memory.move_charge_at_immigrate of the destination cgroup.
  448. If you want to enable it:
  449. # echo (some positive value) > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate
  450. Note: Each bits of move_charge_at_immigrate has its own meaning about what type
  451. of charges should be moved. See 8.2 for details.
  452. Note: Charges are moved only when you move mm->owner, IOW, a leader of a thread
  453. group.
  454. Note: If we cannot find enough space for the task in the destination cgroup, we
  455. try to make space by reclaiming memory. Task migration may fail if we
  456. cannot make enough space.
  457. Note: It can take several seconds if you move charges much.
  458. And if you want disable it again:
  459. # echo 0 > memory.move_charge_at_immigrate
  460. 8.2 Type of charges which can be move
  461. Each bits of move_charge_at_immigrate has its own meaning about what type of
  462. charges should be moved. But in any cases, it must be noted that an account of
  463. a page or a swap can be moved only when it is charged to the task's current(old)
  464. memory cgroup.
  465. bit | what type of charges would be moved ?
  466. -----+------------------------------------------------------------------------
  467. 0 | A charge of an anonymous page(or swap of it) used by the target task.
  468. | Those pages and swaps must be used only by the target task. You must
  469. | enable Swap Extension(see 2.4) to enable move of swap charges.
  470. -----+------------------------------------------------------------------------
  471. 1 | A charge of file pages(normal file, tmpfs file(e.g. ipc shared memory)
  472. | and swaps of tmpfs file) mmapped by the target task. Unlike the case of
  473. | anonymous pages, file pages(and swaps) in the range mmapped by the task
  474. | will be moved even if the task hasn't done page fault, i.e. they might
  475. | not be the task's "RSS", but other task's "RSS" that maps the same file.
  476. | And mapcount of the page is ignored(the page can be moved even if
  477. | page_mapcount(page) > 1). You must enable Swap Extension(see 2.4) to
  478. | enable move of swap charges.
  479. 8.3 TODO
  480. - Implement madvise(2) to let users decide the vma to be moved or not to be
  481. moved.
  482. - All of moving charge operations are done under cgroup_mutex. It's not good
  483. behavior to hold the mutex too long, so we may need some trick.
  484. 9. Memory thresholds
  485. Memory cgroup implements memory thresholds using cgroups notification
  486. API (see cgroups.txt). It allows to register multiple memory and memsw
  487. thresholds and gets notifications when it crosses.
  488. To register a threshold application need:
  489. - create an eventfd using eventfd(2);
  490. - open memory.usage_in_bytes or memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes;
  491. - write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.usage_in_bytes> <threshold>" to
  492. cgroup.event_control.
  493. Application will be notified through eventfd when memory usage crosses
  494. threshold in any direction.
  495. It's applicable for root and non-root cgroup.
  496. 10. OOM Control
  497. memory.oom_control file is for OOM notification and other controls.
  498. Memory cgroup implements OOM notifier using cgroup notification
  499. API (See cgroups.txt). It allows to register multiple OOM notification
  500. delivery and gets notification when OOM happens.
  501. To register a notifier, application need:
  502. - create an eventfd using eventfd(2)
  503. - open memory.oom_control file
  504. - write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.oom_control>" to
  505. cgroup.event_control
  506. Application will be notified through eventfd when OOM happens.
  507. OOM notification doesn't work for root cgroup.
  508. You can disable OOM-killer by writing "1" to memory.oom_control file, as:
  509. #echo 1 > memory.oom_control
  510. This operation is only allowed to the top cgroup of sub-hierarchy.
  511. If OOM-killer is disabled, tasks under cgroup will hang/sleep
  512. in memory cgroup's OOM-waitqueue when they request accountable memory.
  513. For running them, you have to relax the memory cgroup's OOM status by
  514. * enlarge limit or reduce usage.
  515. To reduce usage,
  516. * kill some tasks.
  517. * move some tasks to other group with account migration.
  518. * remove some files (on tmpfs?)
  519. Then, stopped tasks will work again.
  520. At reading, current status of OOM is shown.
  521. oom_kill_disable 0 or 1 (if 1, oom-killer is disabled)
  522. under_oom 0 or 1 (if 1, the memory cgroup is under OOM, tasks may
  523. be stopped.)
  524. 11. TODO
  525. 1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller)
  526. 2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first
  527. 3. Teach controller to account for shared-pages
  528. 4. Start reclamation in the background when the limit is
  529. not yet hit but the usage is getting closer
  530. Summary
  531. Overall, the memory controller has been a stable controller and has been
  532. commented and discussed quite extensively in the community.
  533. References
  534. 1. Singh, Balbir. RFC: Memory Controller, http://lwn.net/Articles/206697/
  535. 2. Singh, Balbir. Memory Controller (RSS Control),
  536. http://lwn.net/Articles/222762/
  537. 3. Emelianov, Pavel. Resource controllers based on process cgroups
  538. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/3/6/198
  539. 4. Emelianov, Pavel. RSS controller based on process cgroups (v2)
  540. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/4/9/78
  541. 5. Emelianov, Pavel. RSS controller based on process cgroups (v3)
  542. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/30/244
  543. 6. Menage, Paul. Control Groups v10, http://lwn.net/Articles/236032/
  544. 7. Vaidyanathan, Srinivasan, Control Groups: Pagecache accounting and control
  545. subsystem (v3), http://lwn.net/Articles/235534/
  546. 8. Singh, Balbir. RSS controller v2 test results (lmbench),
  547. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/17/232
  548. 9. Singh, Balbir. RSS controller v2 AIM9 results
  549. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/5/18/1
  550. 10. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller v6 test results,
  551. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/19/36
  552. 11. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller introduction (v6),
  553. http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/69
  554. 12. Corbet, Jonathan, Controlling memory use in cgroups,
  555. http://lwn.net/Articles/243795/