[RFC][PATCH] memcg soft limit (yet another new design) v1

From: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki
Date: Fri Mar 27 2009 - 01:01:21 EST


Hi,

Memory cgroup's soft limit feature is a feature to tell global LRU
"please reclaim from this memcg at memory shortage".

And Balbir's one and my one was proposed.
This is new one. (so restart from v1), this is very new-born.

While testing soft limit, my dilemma was following.

- needs additional cost of can if implementation is naive (unavoidable?)

- Inactive/Active rotation scheme of global LRU will be broken.

- File/Anon reclaim ratio scheme of global LRU will be broken.
- vm.swappiness will be ignored.

- If using memcg's memory reclaim routine,
- shrink_slab() will be never called.
- stale SwapCache has no chance to be reclaimed (stale SwapCache means
readed but not used one.)
- memcg can have no memory in a zone.
- memcg can have no Anon memory
- lumpty_reclaim() is not called.


This patch tries to avoid to use existing memcg's reclaim routine and
just tell "Hints" to global LRU. This patch is briefly tested and shows
good result to me. (But may not to you. plz brame me.)

Major characteristic is.
- memcg will be inserted to softlimit-queue at charge() if usage excess
soft limit.
- softlimit-queue is a queue with priority. priority is detemined by size
of excessing usage.
- memcg's soft limit hooks is called by shrink_xxx_list() to show hints.
- Behavior is affected by vm.swappiness and LRU scan rate is determined by
global LRU's status.

I'm sorry that I'm tend not to tell enough explanation. plz ask me.
There will be much discussion points, anyway. As usual, I'm not in hurry.


==brief test result==
On 2CPU/1.6GB bytes machine. create group A and B
A. soft limit=300M
B. no soft limit

Run a malloc() program on B and allcoate 1G of memory. The program just
sleeps after allocating memory and no memory refernce after it.
Run make -j 6 and compile the kernel.

When vm.swappiness = 60 => 60MB of memory are swapped out from B.
When vm.swappiness = 10 => 1MB of memory are swapped out from B

If no soft limit, 350MB of swap out will happen from B.(swapiness=60)

I'll try much more complexed ones in the weekend.

Thanks,
-Kame































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