Task Control Groups: basic task cgroup framework

Generic Process Control Groups
--------------------------

There have recently been various proposals floating around for
resource management/accounting and other task grouping subsystems in
the kernel, including ResGroups, User BeanCounters, NSProxy
cgroups, and others.  These all need the basic abstraction of being
able to group together multiple processes in an aggregate, in order to
track/limit the resources permitted to those processes, or control
other behaviour of the processes, and all implement this grouping in
different ways.

This patchset provides a framework for tracking and grouping processes
into arbitrary "cgroups" and assigning arbitrary state to those
groupings, in order to control the behaviour of the cgroup as an
aggregate.

The intention is that the various resource management and
virtualization/cgroup efforts can also become task cgroup
clients, with the result that:

- the userspace APIs are (somewhat) normalised

- it's easier to test e.g. the ResGroups CPU controller in
 conjunction with the BeanCounters memory controller, or use either of
them as the resource-control portion of a virtual server system.

- the additional kernel footprint of any of the competing resource
 management systems is substantially reduced, since it doesn't need
 to provide process grouping/containment, hence improving their
 chances of getting into the kernel

This patch:

Add the main task cgroups framework - the cgroup filesystem, and the
basic structures for tracking membership and associating subsystem state
objects to tasks.

Signed-off-by: Paul Menage <menage@google.com>
Cc: Serge E. Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Dave Hansen <haveblue@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com>
Cc: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: Kirill Korotaev <dev@openvz.org>
Cc: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Cc: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@in.ibm.com>
Cc: Cedric Le Goater <clg@fr.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 526 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/cgroups.txt b/Documentation/cgroups.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..4717887fd75d
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/cgroups.txt
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+                                CGROUPS
+                                -------
+
+Written by Paul Menage <menage@google.com> based on Documentation/cpusets.txt
+
+Original copyright statements from cpusets.txt:
+Portions Copyright (C) 2004 BULL SA.
+Portions Copyright (c) 2004-2006 Silicon Graphics, Inc.
+Modified by Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
+Modified by Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
+
+CONTENTS:
+=========
+
+1. Control Groups
+  1.1 What are cgroups ?
+  1.2 Why are cgroups needed ?
+  1.3 How are cgroups implemented ?
+  1.4 What does notify_on_release do ?
+  1.5 How do I use cgroups ?
+2. Usage Examples and Syntax
+  2.1 Basic Usage
+  2.2 Attaching processes
+3. Kernel API
+  3.1 Overview
+  3.2 Synchronization
+  3.3 Subsystem API
+4. Questions
+
+1. Control Groups
+==========
+
+1.1 What are cgroups ?
+----------------------
+
+Control Groups provide a mechanism for aggregating/partitioning sets of
+tasks, and all their future children, into hierarchical groups with
+specialized behaviour.
+
+Definitions:
+
+A *cgroup* associates a set of tasks with a set of parameters for one
+or more subsystems.
+
+A *subsystem* is a module that makes use of the task grouping
+facilities provided by cgroups to treat groups of tasks in
+particular ways. A subsystem is typically a "resource controller" that
+schedules a resource or applies per-cgroup limits, but it may be
+anything that wants to act on a group of processes, e.g. a
+virtualization subsystem.
+
+A *hierarchy* is a set of cgroups arranged in a tree, such that
+every task in the system is in exactly one of the cgroups in the
+hierarchy, and a set of subsystems; each subsystem has system-specific
+state attached to each cgroup in the hierarchy.  Each hierarchy has
+an instance of the cgroup virtual filesystem associated with it.
+
+At any one time there may be multiple active hierachies of task
+cgroups. Each hierarchy is a partition of all tasks in the system.
+
+User level code may create and destroy cgroups by name in an
+instance of the cgroup virtual file system, specify and query to
+which cgroup a task is assigned, and list the task pids assigned to
+a cgroup. Those creations and assignments only affect the hierarchy
+associated with that instance of the cgroup file system.
+
+On their own, the only use for cgroups is for simple job
+tracking. The intention is that other subsystems hook into the generic
+cgroup support to provide new attributes for cgroups, such as
+accounting/limiting the resources which processes in a cgroup can
+access. For example, cpusets (see Documentation/cpusets.txt) allows
+you to associate a set of CPUs and a set of memory nodes with the
+tasks in each cgroup.
+
+1.2 Why are cgroups needed ?
+----------------------------
+
+There are multiple efforts to provide process aggregations in the
+Linux kernel, mainly for resource tracking purposes. Such efforts
+include cpusets, CKRM/ResGroups, UserBeanCounters, and virtual server
+namespaces. These all require the basic notion of a
+grouping/partitioning of processes, with newly forked processes ending
+in the same group (cgroup) as their parent process.
+
+The kernel cgroup patch provides the minimum essential kernel
+mechanisms required to efficiently implement such groups. It has
+minimal impact on the system fast paths, and provides hooks for
+specific subsystems such as cpusets to provide additional behaviour as
+desired.
+
+Multiple hierarchy support is provided to allow for situations where
+the division of tasks into cgroups is distinctly different for
+different subsystems - having parallel hierarchies allows each
+hierarchy to be a natural division of tasks, without having to handle
+complex combinations of tasks that would be present if several
+unrelated subsystems needed to be forced into the same tree of
+cgroups.
+
+At one extreme, each resource controller or subsystem could be in a
+separate hierarchy; at the other extreme, all subsystems
+would be attached to the same hierarchy.
+
+As an example of a scenario (originally proposed by vatsa@in.ibm.com)
+that can benefit from multiple hierarchies, consider a large
+university server with various users - students, professors, system
+tasks etc. The resource planning for this server could be along the
+following lines:
+
+       CPU :           Top cpuset
+                       /       \
+               CPUSet1         CPUSet2
+                  |              |
+               (Profs)         (Students)
+
+               In addition (system tasks) are attached to topcpuset (so
+               that they can run anywhere) with a limit of 20%
+
+       Memory : Professors (50%), students (30%), system (20%)
+
+       Disk : Prof (50%), students (30%), system (20%)
+
+       Network : WWW browsing (20%), Network File System (60%), others (20%)
+                               / \
+                       Prof (15%) students (5%)
+
+Browsers like firefox/lynx go into the WWW network class, while (k)nfsd go
+into NFS network class.
+
+At the same time firefox/lynx will share an appropriate CPU/Memory class
+depending on who launched it (prof/student).
+
+With the ability to classify tasks differently for different resources
+(by putting those resource subsystems in different hierarchies) then
+the admin can easily set up a script which receives exec notifications
+and depending on who is launching the browser he can
+
+       # echo browser_pid > /mnt/<restype>/<userclass>/tasks
+
+With only a single hierarchy, he now would potentially have to create
+a separate cgroup for every browser launched and associate it with
+approp network and other resource class.  This may lead to
+proliferation of such cgroups.
+
+Also lets say that the administrator would like to give enhanced network
+access temporarily to a student's browser (since it is night and the user
+wants to do online gaming :)  OR give one of the students simulation
+apps enhanced CPU power,
+
+With ability to write pids directly to resource classes, its just a
+matter of :
+
+       # echo pid > /mnt/network/<new_class>/tasks
+       (after some time)
+       # echo pid > /mnt/network/<orig_class>/tasks
+
+Without this ability, he would have to split the cgroup into
+multiple separate ones and then associate the new cgroups with the
+new resource classes.
+
+
+
+1.3 How are cgroups implemented ?
+---------------------------------
+
+Control Groups extends the kernel as follows:
+
+ - Each task in the system has a reference-counted pointer to a
+   css_set.
+
+ - A css_set contains a set of reference-counted pointers to
+   cgroup_subsys_state objects, one for each cgroup subsystem
+   registered in the system. There is no direct link from a task to
+   the cgroup of which it's a member in each hierarchy, but this
+   can be determined by following pointers through the
+   cgroup_subsys_state objects. This is because accessing the
+   subsystem state is something that's expected to happen frequently
+   and in performance-critical code, whereas operations that require a
+   task's actual cgroup assignments (in particular, moving between
+   cgroups) are less common.
+
+ - A cgroup hierarchy filesystem can be mounted  for browsing and
+   manipulation from user space.
+
+ - You can list all the tasks (by pid) attached to any cgroup.
+
+The implementation of cgroups requires a few, simple hooks
+into the rest of the kernel, none in performance critical paths:
+
+ - in init/main.c, to initialize the root cgroups and initial
+   css_set at system boot.
+
+ - in fork and exit, to attach and detach a task from its css_set.
+
+In addition a new file system, of type "cgroup" may be mounted, to
+enable browsing and modifying the cgroups presently known to the
+kernel.  When mounting a cgroup hierarchy, you may specify a
+comma-separated list of subsystems to mount as the filesystem mount
+options.  By default, mounting the cgroup filesystem attempts to
+mount a hierarchy containing all registered subsystems.
+
+If an active hierarchy with exactly the same set of subsystems already
+exists, it will be reused for the new mount. If no existing hierarchy
+matches, and any of the requested subsystems are in use in an existing
+hierarchy, the mount will fail with -EBUSY. Otherwise, a new hierarchy
+is activated, associated with the requested subsystems.
+
+It's not currently possible to bind a new subsystem to an active
+cgroup hierarchy, or to unbind a subsystem from an active cgroup
+hierarchy. This may be possible in future, but is fraught with nasty
+error-recovery issues.
+
+When a cgroup filesystem is unmounted, if there are any
+child cgroups created below the top-level cgroup, that hierarchy
+will remain active even though unmounted; if there are no
+child cgroups then the hierarchy will be deactivated.
+
+No new system calls are added for cgroups - all support for
+querying and modifying cgroups is via this cgroup file system.
+
+Each task under /proc has an added file named 'cgroup' displaying,
+for each active hierarchy, the subsystem names and the cgroup name
+as the path relative to the root of the cgroup file system.
+
+Each cgroup is represented by a directory in the cgroup file system
+containing the following files describing that cgroup:
+
+ - tasks: list of tasks (by pid) attached to that cgroup
+ - notify_on_release flag: run /sbin/cgroup_release_agent on exit?
+
+Other subsystems such as cpusets may add additional files in each
+cgroup dir
+
+New cgroups are created using the mkdir system call or shell
+command.  The properties of a cgroup, such as its flags, are
+modified by writing to the appropriate file in that cgroups
+directory, as listed above.
+
+The named hierarchical structure of nested cgroups allows partitioning
+a large system into nested, dynamically changeable, "soft-partitions".
+
+The attachment of each task, automatically inherited at fork by any
+children of that task, to a cgroup allows organizing the work load
+on a system into related sets of tasks.  A task may be re-attached to
+any other cgroup, if allowed by the permissions on the necessary
+cgroup file system directories.
+
+When a task is moved from one cgroup to another, it gets a new
+css_set pointer - if there's an already existing css_set with the
+desired collection of cgroups then that group is reused, else a new
+css_set is allocated. Note that the current implementation uses a
+linear search to locate an appropriate existing css_set, so isn't
+very efficient. A future version will use a hash table for better
+performance.
+
+The use of a Linux virtual file system (vfs) to represent the
+cgroup hierarchy provides for a familiar permission and name space
+for cgroups, with a minimum of additional kernel code.
+
+1.4 What does notify_on_release do ?
+------------------------------------
+
+*** notify_on_release is disabled in the current patch set. It will be
+*** reactivated in a future patch in a less-intrusive manner
+
+If the notify_on_release flag is enabled (1) in a cgroup, then
+whenever the last task in the cgroup leaves (exits or attaches to
+some other cgroup) and the last child cgroup of that cgroup
+is removed, then the kernel runs the command specified by the contents
+of the "release_agent" file in that hierarchy's root directory,
+supplying the pathname (relative to the mount point of the cgroup
+file system) of the abandoned cgroup.  This enables automatic
+removal of abandoned cgroups.  The default value of
+notify_on_release in the root cgroup at system boot is disabled
+(0).  The default value of other cgroups at creation is the current
+value of their parents notify_on_release setting. The default value of
+a cgroup hierarchy's release_agent path is empty.
+
+1.5 How do I use cgroups ?
+--------------------------
+
+To start a new job that is to be contained within a cgroup, using
+the "cpuset" cgroup subsystem, the steps are something like:
+
+ 1) mkdir /dev/cgroup
+ 2) mount -t cgroup -ocpuset cpuset /dev/cgroup
+ 3) Create the new cgroup by doing mkdir's and write's (or echo's) in
+    the /dev/cgroup virtual file system.
+ 4) Start a task that will be the "founding father" of the new job.
+ 5) Attach that task to the new cgroup by writing its pid to the
+    /dev/cgroup tasks file for that cgroup.
+ 6) fork, exec or clone the job tasks from this founding father task.
+
+For example, the following sequence of commands will setup a cgroup
+named "Charlie", containing just CPUs 2 and 3, and Memory Node 1,
+and then start a subshell 'sh' in that cgroup:
+
+  mount -t cgroup cpuset -ocpuset /dev/cgroup
+  cd /dev/cgroup
+  mkdir Charlie
+  cd Charlie
+  /bin/echo 2-3 > cpus
+  /bin/echo 1 > mems
+  /bin/echo $$ > tasks
+  sh
+  # The subshell 'sh' is now running in cgroup Charlie
+  # The next line should display '/Charlie'
+  cat /proc/self/cgroup
+
+2. Usage Examples and Syntax
+============================
+
+2.1 Basic Usage
+---------------
+
+Creating, modifying, using the cgroups can be done through the cgroup
+virtual filesystem.
+
+To mount a cgroup hierarchy will all available subsystems, type:
+# mount -t cgroup xxx /dev/cgroup
+
+The "xxx" is not interpreted by the cgroup code, but will appear in
+/proc/mounts so may be any useful identifying string that you like.
+
+To mount a cgroup hierarchy with just the cpuset and numtasks
+subsystems, type:
+# mount -t cgroup -o cpuset,numtasks hier1 /dev/cgroup
+
+To change the set of subsystems bound to a mounted hierarchy, just
+remount with different options:
+
+# mount -o remount,cpuset,ns  /dev/cgroup
+
+Note that changing the set of subsystems is currently only supported
+when the hierarchy consists of a single (root) cgroup. Supporting
+the ability to arbitrarily bind/unbind subsystems from an existing
+cgroup hierarchy is intended to be implemented in the future.
+
+Then under /dev/cgroup you can find a tree that corresponds to the
+tree of the cgroups in the system. For instance, /dev/cgroup
+is the cgroup that holds the whole system.
+
+If you want to create a new cgroup under /dev/cgroup:
+# cd /dev/cgroup
+# mkdir my_cgroup
+
+Now you want to do something with this cgroup.
+# cd my_cgroup
+
+In this directory you can find several files:
+# ls
+notify_on_release release_agent tasks
+(plus whatever files are added by the attached subsystems)
+
+Now attach your shell to this cgroup:
+# /bin/echo $$ > tasks
+
+You can also create cgroups inside your cgroup by using mkdir in this
+directory.
+# mkdir my_sub_cs
+
+To remove a cgroup, just use rmdir:
+# rmdir my_sub_cs
+
+This will fail if the cgroup is in use (has cgroups inside, or
+has processes attached, or is held alive by other subsystem-specific
+reference).
+
+2.2 Attaching processes
+-----------------------
+
+# /bin/echo PID > tasks
+
+Note that it is PID, not PIDs. You can only attach ONE task at a time.
+If you have several tasks to attach, you have to do it one after another:
+
+# /bin/echo PID1 > tasks
+# /bin/echo PID2 > tasks
+        ...
+# /bin/echo PIDn > tasks
+
+3. Kernel API
+=============
+
+3.1 Overview
+------------
+
+Each kernel subsystem that wants to hook into the generic cgroup
+system needs to create a cgroup_subsys object. This contains
+various methods, which are callbacks from the cgroup system, along
+with a subsystem id which will be assigned by the cgroup system.
+
+Other fields in the cgroup_subsys object include:
+
+- subsys_id: a unique array index for the subsystem, indicating which
+  entry in cgroup->subsys[] this subsystem should be
+  managing. Initialized by cgroup_register_subsys(); prior to this
+  it should be initialized to -1
+
+- hierarchy: an index indicating which hierarchy, if any, this
+  subsystem is currently attached to. If this is -1, then the
+  subsystem is not attached to any hierarchy, and all tasks should be
+  considered to be members of the subsystem's top_cgroup. It should
+  be initialized to -1.
+
+- name: should be initialized to a unique subsystem name prior to
+  calling cgroup_register_subsystem. Should be no longer than
+  MAX_CGROUP_TYPE_NAMELEN
+
+Each cgroup object created by the system has an array of pointers,
+indexed by subsystem id; this pointer is entirely managed by the
+subsystem; the generic cgroup code will never touch this pointer.
+
+3.2 Synchronization
+-------------------
+
+There is a global mutex, cgroup_mutex, used by the cgroup
+system. This should be taken by anything that wants to modify a
+cgroup. It may also be taken to prevent cgroups from being
+modified, but more specific locks may be more appropriate in that
+situation.
+
+See kernel/cgroup.c for more details.
+
+Subsystems can take/release the cgroup_mutex via the functions
+cgroup_lock()/cgroup_unlock(), and can
+take/release the callback_mutex via the functions
+cgroup_lock()/cgroup_unlock().
+
+Accessing a task's cgroup pointer may be done in the following ways:
+- while holding cgroup_mutex
+- while holding the task's alloc_lock (via task_lock())
+- inside an rcu_read_lock() section via rcu_dereference()
+
+3.3 Subsystem API
+--------------------------
+
+Each subsystem should:
+
+- add an entry in linux/cgroup_subsys.h
+- define a cgroup_subsys object called <name>_subsys
+
+Each subsystem may export the following methods. The only mandatory
+methods are create/destroy. Any others that are null are presumed to
+be successful no-ops.
+
+struct cgroup_subsys_state *create(struct cgroup *cont)
+LL=cgroup_mutex
+
+Called to create a subsystem state object for a cgroup. The
+subsystem should allocate its subsystem state object for the passed
+cgroup, returning a pointer to the new object on success or a
+negative error code. On success, the subsystem pointer should point to
+a structure of type cgroup_subsys_state (typically embedded in a
+larger subsystem-specific object), which will be initialized by the
+cgroup system. Note that this will be called at initialization to
+create the root subsystem state for this subsystem; this case can be
+identified by the passed cgroup object having a NULL parent (since
+it's the root of the hierarchy) and may be an appropriate place for
+initialization code.
+
+void destroy(struct cgroup *cont)
+LL=cgroup_mutex
+
+The cgroup system is about to destroy the passed cgroup; the
+subsystem should do any necessary cleanup
+
+int can_attach(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cont,
+               struct task_struct *task)
+LL=cgroup_mutex
+
+Called prior to moving a task into a cgroup; if the subsystem
+returns an error, this will abort the attach operation.  If a NULL
+task is passed, then a successful result indicates that *any*
+unspecified task can be moved into the cgroup. Note that this isn't
+called on a fork. If this method returns 0 (success) then this should
+remain valid while the caller holds cgroup_mutex.
+
+void attach(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cont,
+            struct cgroup *old_cont, struct task_struct *task)
+LL=cgroup_mutex
+
+
+Called after the task has been attached to the cgroup, to allow any
+post-attachment activity that requires memory allocations or blocking.
+
+void fork(struct cgroup_subsy *ss, struct task_struct *task)
+LL=callback_mutex, maybe read_lock(tasklist_lock)
+
+Called when a task is forked into a cgroup. Also called during
+registration for all existing tasks.
+
+void exit(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct task_struct *task)
+LL=callback_mutex
+
+Called during task exit
+
+int populate(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cont)
+LL=none
+
+Called after creation of a cgroup to allow a subsystem to populate
+the cgroup directory with file entries.  The subsystem should make
+calls to cgroup_add_file() with objects of type cftype (see
+include/linux/cgroup.h for details).  Note that although this
+method can return an error code, the error code is currently not
+always handled well.
+
+void bind(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *root)
+LL=callback_mutex
+
+Called when a cgroup subsystem is rebound to a different hierarchy
+and root cgroup. Currently this will only involve movement between
+the default hierarchy (which never has sub-cgroups) and a hierarchy
+that is being created/destroyed (and hence has no sub-cgroups).
+
+4. Questions
+============
+
+Q: what's up with this '/bin/echo' ?
+A: bash's builtin 'echo' command does not check calls to write() against
+   errors. If you use it in the cgroup file system, you won't be
+   able to tell whether a command succeeded or failed.
+
+Q: When I attach processes, only the first of the line gets really attached !
+A: We can only return one error code per call to write(). So you should also
+   put only ONE pid.
+