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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/controllers/memory.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/controllers/memory.txt | 135 |
1 files changed, 125 insertions, 10 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt b/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt index 1c07547d3f81..e1501964df1e 100644 --- a/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt +++ b/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt @@ -137,7 +137,32 @@ 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). -2.4 Reclaim +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. + +usage of mem+swap is limited by memsw.limit_in_bytes. + +Note: why 'mem+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 +mem+swap. + +In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without affecting +global LRU, mem+swap limit is better than just limiting swap from OS point +of view. + +2.5 Reclaim Each cgroup maintains a per cgroup LRU that consists of an active and inactive list. When a cgroup goes over its limit, we first try @@ -207,12 +232,6 @@ exceeded. The memory.stat file gives accounting information. Now, the number of caches, RSS and Active pages/Inactive pages are shown. -The memory.force_empty gives an interface to drop *all* charges by force. - -# echo 1 > memory.force_empty - -will drop all charges in cgroup. Currently, this is maintained for test. - 4. Testing Balbir posted lmbench, AIM9, LTP and vmmstress results [10] and [11]. @@ -242,10 +261,106 @@ reclaimed. 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. Such charges are automatically dropped at -rmdir() if there are no tasks. +tasks have migrated away from it. +Such charges are freed(at default) or moved to its parent. When moved, +both of RSS and CACHES are moved to parent. +If both of them are busy, rmdir() returns -EBUSY. 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 memcg will be unmapped and freed. Some of + pages cannot be freed because it's locked or in-use. Such pages are moved + to parent and this cgroup will be empty. But this may return -EBUSY in + some too busy case. + + 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 (now) + cache - # of pages from page-cache and shmem. + rss - # of pages from anonymous memory. + pgpgin - # of event of charging + pgpgout - # of event of uncharging + active_anon - # of pages on active lru of anon, shmem. + inactive_anon - # of pages on active lru of anon, shmem + active_file - # of pages on active lru of file-cache + inactive_file - # of pages on inactive lru of file cache + unevictable - # of pages cannot be reclaimed.(mlocked etc) + + Below is depend on CONFIG_DEBUG_VM. + inactive_ratio - VM inernal 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. + + +5.3 swappiness + Similar to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but affecting a hierarchy of groups only. + + Following cgroup's swapiness can't be changed. + - root cgroup (uses /proc/sys/vm/swappiness). + - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and it has child cgroup. + - a cgroup which uses hierarchy and not the root of hierarchy. + + +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 + +The memory controller 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 the cgroup already has other +cgroups created below it. + +NOTE2: This feature can be enabled/disabled per subtree. -5. TODO +7. TODO 1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller) 2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first |