memcg: add memory.pressure_level events

With this patch userland applications that want to maintain the
interactivity/memory allocation cost can use the pressure level
notifications.  The levels are defined like this:

The "low" level means that the system is reclaiming memory for new
allocations.  Monitoring this reclaiming activity might be useful for
maintaining cache level.  Upon notification, the program (typically
"Activity Manager") might analyze vmstat and act in advance (i.e.
prematurely shutdown unimportant services).

The "medium" level means that the system is experiencing medium memory
pressure, the system might be making swap, paging out active file
caches, etc.  Upon this event applications may decide to further analyze
vmstat/zoneinfo/memcg or internal memory usage statistics and free any
resources that can be easily reconstructed or re-read from a disk.

The "critical" level means that the system is actively thrashing, it is
about to out of memory (OOM) or even the in-kernel OOM killer is on its
way to trigger.  Applications should do whatever they can to help the
system.  It might be too late to consult with vmstat or any other
statistics, so it's advisable to take an immediate action.

The events are propagated upward until the event is handled, i.e.  the
events are not pass-through.  Here is what this means: for example you
have three cgroups: A->B->C.  Now you set up an event listener on
cgroups A, B and C, and suppose group C experiences some pressure.  In
this situation, only group C will receive the notification, i.e.  groups
A and B will not receive it.  This is done to avoid excessive
"broadcasting" of messages, which disturbs the system and which is
especially bad if we are low on memory or thrashing.  So, organize the
cgroups wisely, or propagate the events manually (or, ask us to
implement the pass-through events, explaining why would you need them.)

Performance wise, the memory pressure notifications feature itself is
lightweight and does not require much of bookkeeping, in contrast to the
rest of memcg features.  Unfortunately, as of current memcg
implementation, pages accounting is an inseparable part and cannot be
turned off.  The good news is that there are some efforts[1] to improve
the situation; plus, implementing the same, fully API-compatible[2]
interface for CONFIG_MEMCG=n case (e.g.  embedded) is also a viable
option, so it will not require any changes on the userland side.

[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.cgroups/6291
[2] http://lkml.org/lkml/2013/2/21/454

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix CONFIG_CGROPUPS=n warnings]
Signed-off-by: Anton Vorontsov <anton.vorontsov@linaro.org>
Acked-by: Kirill A. Shutemov <kirill@shutemov.name>
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com>
Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Cc: Luiz Capitulino <lcapitulino@redhat.com>
Cc: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
Cc: Leonid Moiseichuk <leonid.moiseichuk@nokia.com>
Cc: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <b.zolnierkie@samsung.com>
Cc: John Stultz <john.stultz@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 69 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt b/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
index 8b8c28b9864c..f336ede58e62 100644
--- a/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
+++ b/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
@@ -40,6 +40,7 @@ Features:
  - soft limit
  - moving (recharging) account at moving a task is selectable.
  - usage threshold notifier
+ - memory pressure notifier
  - oom-killer disable knob and oom-notifier
  - Root cgroup has no limit controls.
 
@@ -65,6 +66,7 @@ Brief summary of control files.
  memory.stat                     # show various statistics
  memory.use_hierarchy            # set/show hierarchical account enabled
  memory.force_empty              # trigger forced move charge to parent
+ memory.pressure_level           # set memory pressure notifications
  memory.swappiness               # set/show swappiness parameter of vmscan
                                  (See sysctl's vm.swappiness)
  memory.move_charge_at_immigrate # set/show controls of moving charges
@@ -762,7 +764,73 @@ At reading, current status of OOM is shown.
         under_oom        0 or 1 (if 1, the memory cgroup is under OOM, tasks may
                                  be stopped.)
 
-11. TODO
+11. Memory Pressure
+
+The pressure level notifications can be used to monitor the memory
+allocation cost; based on the pressure, applications can implement
+different strategies of managing their memory resources. The pressure
+levels are defined as following:
+
+The "low" level means that the system is reclaiming memory for new
+allocations. Monitoring this reclaiming activity might be useful for
+maintaining cache level. Upon notification, the program (typically
+"Activity Manager") might analyze vmstat and act in advance (i.e.
+prematurely shutdown unimportant services).
+
+The "medium" level means that the system is experiencing medium memory
+pressure, the system might be making swap, paging out active file caches,
+etc. Upon this event applications may decide to further analyze
+vmstat/zoneinfo/memcg or internal memory usage statistics and free any
+resources that can be easily reconstructed or re-read from a disk.
+
+The "critical" level means that the system is actively thrashing, it is
+about to out of memory (OOM) or even the in-kernel OOM killer is on its
+way to trigger. Applications should do whatever they can to help the
+system. It might be too late to consult with vmstat or any other
+statistics, so it's advisable to take an immediate action.
+
+The events are propagated upward until the event is handled, i.e. the
+events are not pass-through. Here is what this means: for example you have
+three cgroups: A->B->C. Now you set up an event listener on cgroups A, B
+and C, and suppose group C experiences some pressure. In this situation,
+only group C will receive the notification, i.e. groups A and B will not
+receive it. This is done to avoid excessive "broadcasting" of messages,
+which disturbs the system and which is especially bad if we are low on
+memory or thrashing. So, organize the cgroups wisely, or propagate the
+events manually (or, ask us to implement the pass-through events,
+explaining why would you need them.)
+
+The file memory.pressure_level is only used to setup an eventfd. To
+register a notification, an application must:
+
+- create an eventfd using eventfd(2);
+- open memory.pressure_level;
+- write string like "<event_fd> <fd of memory.pressure_level> <level>"
+  to cgroup.event_control.
+
+Application will be notified through eventfd when memory pressure is at
+the specific level (or higher). Read/write operations to
+memory.pressure_level are no implemented.
+
+Test:
+
+   Here is a small script example that makes a new cgroup, sets up a
+   memory limit, sets up a notification in the cgroup and then makes child
+   cgroup experience a critical pressure:
+
+   # cd /sys/fs/cgroup/memory/
+   # mkdir foo
+   # cd foo
+   # cgroup_event_listener memory.pressure_level low &
+   # echo 8000000 > memory.limit_in_bytes
+   # echo 8000000 > memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes
+   # echo $$ > tasks
+   # dd if=/dev/zero | read x
+
+   (Expect a bunch of notifications, and eventually, the oom-killer will
+   trigger.)
+
+12. TODO
 
 1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller)
 2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first