Memory controller: add document

Signed-off-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Pavel Emelianov <xemul@openvz.org>
Cc: Paul Menage <menage@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Kirill Korotaev <dev@sw.ru>
Cc: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Vaidyanathan Srinivasan <svaidy@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 259 insertions, 0 deletions

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+Memory Controller
+
+Salient features
+
+a. Enable control of both RSS (mapped) and Page Cache (unmapped) pages
+b. The infrastructure allows easy addition of other types of memory to control
+c. Provides *zero overhead* for non memory controller users
+d. Provides a double LRU: global memory pressure causes reclaim from the
+   global LRU; a cgroup on hitting a limit, reclaims from the per
+   cgroup LRU
+
+NOTE: Page Cache (unmapped) also includes Swap Cache pages as a subset
+and will not be referred to explicitly in the rest of the documentation.
+
+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).
+
+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
+allocated and associated with the page.  This routine also adds the page to
+the per cgroup LRU.
+
+2.2.1 Accounting details
+
+All mapped pages (RSS) and unmapped user pages (Page Cache) are accounted.
+RSS pages are accounted at the time of page_add_*_rmap() unless they've already
+been accounted for earlier. A file page will be accounted for as Page Cache;
+it's mapped into the page tables of a process, duplicate accounting is carefully
+avoided. Page Cache pages are accounted at the time of add_to_page_cache().
+The corresponding routines that remove a page from the page tables or removes
+a page from Page Cache is used to decrement the accounting counters of the
+cgroup.
+
+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).
+
+2.4 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
+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.
+
+The reclaim algorithm has not been modified for cgroups, except that
+pages that are selected for reclaiming come from the per cgroup LRU
+list.
+
+2. Locking
+
+The memory controller uses the following hierarchy
+
+1. zone->lru_lock is used for selecting pages to be isolated
+2. mem->lru_lock protects the per cgroup LRU
+3. lock_page_cgroup() is used to protect page->page_cgroup
+
+3. User Interface
+
+0. Configuration
+
+a. Enable CONFIG_CGROUPS
+b. Enable CONFIG_RESOURCE_COUNTERS
+c. Enable CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_CONT
+
+1. Prepare the cgroups
+# mkdir -p /cgroups
+# mount -t cgroup none /cgroups -o memory
+
+2. Make the new group and move bash into it
+# mkdir /cgroups/0
+# echo $$ >  /cgroups/0/tasks
+
+Since now we're in the 0 cgroup,
+We can alter the memory limit:
+# echo -n 6000 > /cgroups/0/memory.limit
+
+We can check the usage:
+# cat /cgroups/0/memory.usage
+25
+
+The memory.failcnt field gives the number of times that the cgroup limit was
+exceeded.
+
+4. Testing
+
+Balbir posted lmbench, AIM9, LTP and vmmstress results [10] and [11].
+Apart from that v6 has been tested with several applications and regular
+daily use. The controller has also been tested on the PPC64, x86_64 and
+UML platforms.
+
+4.1 Troubleshooting
+
+Sometimes a user might find that the application under a cgroup is
+terminated. 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).
+
+4.2 Task migration
+
+When a task migrates from one cgroup to another, it's charge is not
+carried forward. The pages allocated from the original cgroup still
+remain charged to it, the charge is dropped when the page is freed or
+reclaimed.
+
+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. If some pages are still left, after following
+the steps listed in sections 4.1 and 4.2, check the Swap Cache usage in
+/proc/meminfo to see if the Swap Cache usage is showing up in the
+cgroups memory.usage counter. A simple test of swapoff -a and swapon -a
+should free any pending Swap Cache usage.
+
+4.4 Choosing what to account  -- Page Cache (unmapped) vs RSS (mapped)?
+
+The type of memory accounted by the cgroup can be limited to just
+mapped pages by writing "1" to memory.control_type field
+
+echo -n 1 > memory.control_type
+
+5. TODO
+
+1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller)
+2. Improve the user interface to accept/display memory limits in KB or MB
+   rather than pages (since page sizes can differ across platforms/machines).
+3. Make cgroup lists per-zone
+4. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first
+5. Teach controller to account for shared-pages
+6. Start reclamation when the limit is lowered
+7. Start reclamation in the background when the limit is
+   not yet hit but the usage is getting closer
+8. Create per zone LRU lists per cgroup
+
+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/2007/4/9/74
+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 results,
+    http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/19/36
+11. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller v6, http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/69
+12. Corbet, Jonathan, Controlling memory use in cgroups,
+    http://lwn.net/Articles/243795/