Re: [RFC] [PATCH] cgroup: limit network bandwidth

[Paul Menage]

On Jan 23, 2008 8:48 AM, Andrea Righi <righiandr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > 1. Implementation of soft limits (limit on contention of resource)
> >    gets harder
>
> Why? do you mean implementing a grace time when the soft-limit is
> exceeded? this could be done in cgroup_nl_throttle() introducing 3
> additional attributes to struct netlimit (i.e. hard_limit,
> last_time_exceeded grace_time) and perform something like:
> ...
>         if ((current_rate > hard_limit) ||
>             time_after(jiffies, last_time_exceeded + grace_time))
>                         schedule_timeout(sleep);
> ...

He's talking about cases where we want the behaviour to be
work-conserving, whilst still offering guarantees in the event of
contention. e.g. cgroups A and B each get a 20% guarantee on the TX
path if they need it, but anyone can use any otherwise-idle bandwidth.
(This is relatively straightforward to set up from userspace with the
standard Linux traffic control tools).

>
> Yes, the integration with iptables (as Paul said), and traffic shaping
> rules would be absolutely the right way(tm) in perspective. I was just
> proposing a possible simple API to implement the limiting stuff.

But this issue (traffic control for cgroups) is too complex to be
described by a simple API. Any simple API you choose to try to
describe the limiting directly will be insufficient for a good number
of the potential users. Better to just provide a (very simple) API to
hook into the existing (complex) traffic control API and leave the
tricky stuff to userspace, where anyone can construct arbitrarily
complex queueing schemes with a shell script and a few calls to "tc".

Paul
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