Re: [PATCH 3/3] cgroup: implement cgroup.subtree_populated for the default hierarchy

From: Li Zefan
Date: Tue Apr 15 2014 - 22:49:19 EST


Hi Tejun,

On 2014/4/15 5:44, Tejun Heo wrote:
> cgroup users often need a way to determine when a cgroup's
> subhierarchy becomes empty so that it can be cleaned up. cgroup
> currently provides release_agent for it; unfortunately, this mechanism
> is riddled with issues.
>
> * It delivers events by forking and execing a userland binary
> specified as the release_agent. This is a long deprecated method of
> notification delivery. It's extremely heavy, slow and cumbersome to
> integrate with larger infrastructure.
>
> * There is single monitoring point at the root. There's no way to
> delegate management of subtree.
>
> * The event isn't recursive. It triggers when a cgroup doesn't have
> any tasks or child cgroups. Events for internal nodes trigger only
> after all children are removed. This again makes it impossible to
> delegate management of subtree.
>
> * Events are filtered from the kernel side. "notify_on_release" file
> is used to subscribe to or suppress release event. This is
> unnecessarily complicated and probably done this way because event
> delivery itself was expensive.
>
> This patch implements interface file "cgroup.subtree_populated" which
> can be used to monitor whether the cgroup's subhierarchy has tasks in
> it or not. Its value is 0 if there is no task in the cgroup and its
> descendants; otherwise, 1, and kernfs_notify() notificaiton is
> triggers when the value changes, which can be monitored through poll
> and [di]notify.
>

For the old notification mechanism, the path of the cgroup that becomes
empty will be passed to the user specified release agent. Like this:

# cat /sbin/cpuset_release_agent
#!/bin/sh
rmdir /dev/cpuset/$1

How do we achieve this using inotify?

- monitor all the cgroups, or
- monitor all the leaf cgroups, and travel cgrp->parent to delete all
empty cgroups.
- monitor root cgroup only, and travel the whole hierarchy to find
empy cgroups when it gets an fs event.

Seems none of them is scalible.

> This is a lot ligther and simpler and trivially allows delegating
> management of subhierarchy - subhierarchy monitoring can block further
> propgation simply by putting itself or another process in the root of
> the subhierarchy and monitor events that it's interested in from there
> without interfering with monitoring higher in the tree.
>
> v2: Patch description updated as per Serge.
>

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