linux/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt

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Memory Resource Controller
NOTE: The Memory Resource Controller has been generically been referred
to as the memory controller in this document. Do not confuse memory controller
used here with the memory controller that is used in hardware.
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: Swap Cache (unmapped) is not accounted now.
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 anon pages (RSS) and cache pages (Page Cache) are accounted.
(some pages which never be reclaimable and will not be on global LRU
are not accounted. we just accounts pages under usual vm management.)
RSS pages are accounted at page_fault unless they've already been accounted
for earlier. A file page will be accounted for as Page Cache when it's
inserted into inode (radix-tree). While it's mapped into the page tables of
processes, duplicate accounting is carefully avoided.
A RSS page is unaccounted when it's fully unmapped. A PageCache page is
unaccounted when it's removed from radix-tree.
At page migration, accounting information is kept.
Note: we just account pages-on-lru because our purpose is to control amount
of used pages. not-on-lru pages are tend to be out-of-control from vm view.
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).
memcg: mem+swap controller core This patch implements per cgroup limit for usage of memory+swap. However there are SwapCache, double counting of swap-cache and swap-entry is avoided. Mem+Swap controller works as following. - memory usage is limited by memory.limit_in_bytes. - memory + swap usage is limited by memory.memsw_limit_in_bytes. This has following benefits. - A user can limit total resource usage of mem+swap. Without this, because memory resource controller doesn't take care of usage of swap, a process can exhaust all the swap (by memory leak.) We can avoid this case. And Swap is shared resource but it cannot be reclaimed (goes back to memory) until it's used. This characteristic can be trouble when the memory is divided into some parts by cpuset or memcg. Assume group A and group B. After some application executes, the system can be.. Group A -- very large free memory space but occupy 99% of swap. Group B -- under memory shortage but cannot use swap...it's nearly full. Ability to set appropriate swap limit for each group is required. Maybe someone wonder "why not swap but mem+swap ?" - The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of mem+swap. In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without affecting global LRU, mem+swap limit is better than just limiting swap. Accounting target information is stored in swap_cgroup which is per swap entry record. Charge is done as following. map - charge page and memsw. unmap - uncharge page/memsw if not SwapCache. swap-out (__delete_from_swap_cache) - uncharge page - record mem_cgroup information to swap_cgroup. swap-in (do_swap_page) - charged as page and memsw. record in swap_cgroup is cleared. memsw accounting is decremented. swap-free (swap_free()) - if swap entry is freed, memsw is uncharged by PAGE_SIZE. There are people work under never-swap environments and consider swap as something bad. For such people, this mem+swap controller extension is just an overhead. This overhead is avoided by config or boot option. (see Kconfig. detail is not in this patch.) TODO: - maybe more optimization can be don in swap-in path. (but not very safe.) But we just do simple accounting at this stage. [nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp: make resize limit hold mutex] [hugh@veritas.com: memswap controller core swapcache fixes] Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org> Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-08 02:08:00 +00:00
Exception: If CONFIG_CGROUP_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP is not used..
When you do swapoff and make swapped-out pages of shmem(tmpfs) to
memcg: handle swap caches SwapCache support for memory resource controller (memcg) Before mem+swap controller, memcg itself should handle SwapCache in proper way. This is cut-out from it. In current memcg, SwapCache is just leaked and the user can create tons of SwapCache. This is a leak of account and should be handled. SwapCache accounting is done as following. charge (anon) - charged when it's mapped. (because of readahead, charge at add_to_swap_cache() is not sane) uncharge (anon) - uncharged when it's dropped from swapcache and fully unmapped. means it's not uncharged at unmap. Note: delete from swap cache at swap-in is done after rmap information is established. charge (shmem) - charged at swap-in. this prevents charge at add_to_page_cache(). uncharge (shmem) - uncharged when it's dropped from swapcache and not on shmem's radix-tree. at migration, check against 'old page' is modified to handle shmem. Comparing to the old version discussed (and caused troubles), we have advantages of - PCG_USED bit. - simple migrating handling. So, situation is much easier than several months ago, maybe. [hugh@veritas.com: memcg: handle swap caches build fix] Reviewed-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Tested-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-08 02:07:56 +00:00
be backed into memory in force, charges for pages are accounted against the
caller of swapoff rather than the users of shmem.
memcg: mem+swap controller core This patch implements per cgroup limit for usage of memory+swap. However there are SwapCache, double counting of swap-cache and swap-entry is avoided. Mem+Swap controller works as following. - memory usage is limited by memory.limit_in_bytes. - memory + swap usage is limited by memory.memsw_limit_in_bytes. This has following benefits. - A user can limit total resource usage of mem+swap. Without this, because memory resource controller doesn't take care of usage of swap, a process can exhaust all the swap (by memory leak.) We can avoid this case. And Swap is shared resource but it cannot be reclaimed (goes back to memory) until it's used. This characteristic can be trouble when the memory is divided into some parts by cpuset or memcg. Assume group A and group B. After some application executes, the system can be.. Group A -- very large free memory space but occupy 99% of swap. Group B -- under memory shortage but cannot use swap...it's nearly full. Ability to set appropriate swap limit for each group is required. Maybe someone wonder "why not swap but mem+swap ?" - The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of mem+swap. In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without affecting global LRU, mem+swap limit is better than just limiting swap. Accounting target information is stored in swap_cgroup which is per swap entry record. Charge is done as following. map - charge page and memsw. unmap - uncharge page/memsw if not SwapCache. swap-out (__delete_from_swap_cache) - uncharge page - record mem_cgroup information to swap_cgroup. swap-in (do_swap_page) - charged as page and memsw. record in swap_cgroup is cleared. memsw accounting is decremented. swap-free (swap_free()) - if swap entry is freed, memsw is uncharged by PAGE_SIZE. There are people work under never-swap environments and consider swap as something bad. For such people, this mem+swap controller extension is just an overhead. This overhead is avoided by config or boot option. (see Kconfig. detail is not in this patch.) TODO: - maybe more optimization can be don in swap-in path. (but not very safe.) But we just do simple accounting at this stage. [nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp: make resize limit hold mutex] [hugh@veritas.com: memswap controller core swapcache fixes] Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org> Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-08 02:08:00 +00:00
2.4 Swap Extension (CONFIG_CGROUP_MEM_RES_CTLR_SWAP)
Swap Extension allows you to record charge for swap. A swapped-in page is
charged back to original page allocator if possible.
When swap is accounted, following files are added.
- memory.memsw.usage_in_bytes.
- memory.memsw.limit_in_bytes.
usage of mem+swap is limited by memsw.limit_in_bytes.
Note: why 'mem+swap' rather than swap.
The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means
to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of
mem+swap.
In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without affecting
global LRU, mem+swap limit is better than just limiting swap from OS point
of view.
2.5 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->per_zone->lru_lock protects the per cgroup LRU (per zone)
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_RES_CTLR
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 4M > /cgroups/0/memory.limit_in_bytes
NOTE: We can use a suffix (k, K, m, M, g or G) to indicate values in kilo,
mega or gigabytes.
# cat /cgroups/0/memory.limit_in_bytes
4194304
NOTE: The interface has now changed to display the usage in bytes
instead of pages
We can check the usage:
# cat /cgroups/0/memory.usage_in_bytes
1216512
A successful write to this file does not guarantee a successful set of
this limit to the value written into the file. This can be due to a
number of factors, such as rounding up to page boundaries or the total
availability of memory on the system. The user is required to re-read
this file after a write to guarantee the value committed by the kernel.
# echo 1 > memory.limit_in_bytes
# cat memory.limit_in_bytes
4096
The memory.failcnt field gives the number of times that the cgroup limit was
exceeded.
The memory.stat file gives accounting information. Now, the number of
caches, RSS and Active pages/Inactive pages are shown.
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
memcg: move all acccounting to parent at rmdir() This patch provides a function to move account information of a page between mem_cgroups and rewrite force_empty to make use of this. This moving of page_cgroup is done under - lru_lock of source/destination mem_cgroup is held. - lock_page_cgroup() is held. Then, a routine which touches pc->mem_cgroup without lock_page_cgroup() should confirm pc->mem_cgroup is still valid or not. Typical code can be following. (while page is not under lock_page()) mem = pc->mem_cgroup; mz = page_cgroup_zoneinfo(pc) spin_lock_irqsave(&mz->lru_lock); if (pc->mem_cgroup == mem) ...../* some list handling */ spin_unlock_irqrestore(&mz->lru_lock); Of course, better way is lock_page_cgroup(pc); .... unlock_page_cgroup(pc); But you should confirm the nest of lock and avoid deadlock. If you treats page_cgroup from mem_cgroup's LRU under mz->lru_lock, you don't have to worry about what pc->mem_cgroup points to. moved pages are added to head of lru, not to tail. Expected users of this routine is: - force_empty (rmdir) - moving tasks between cgroup (for moving account information.) - hierarchy (maybe useful.) force_empty(rmdir) uses this move_account and move pages to its parent. This "move" will not cause OOM (I added "oom" parameter to try_charge().) If the parent is busy (not enough memory), force_empty calls try_to_free_page() and reduce usage. Purpose of this behavior is - Fix "forget all" behavior of force_empty and avoid leak of accounting. - By "moving first, free if necessary", keep pages on memory as much as possible. Adding a switch to change behavior of force_empty to - free first, move if necessary - free all, if there is mlocked/busy pages, return -EBUSY. is under consideration. (I'll add if someone requtests.) This patch also removes memory.force_empty file, a brutal debug-only interface. Reviewed-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Tested-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: Paul Menage <menage@google.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-08 02:07:53 +00:00
tasks have migrated away from it.
Such charges are freed(at default) or moved to its parent. When moved,
both of RSS and CACHES are moved to parent.
If both of them are busy, rmdir() returns -EBUSY. See 5.1 Also.
memcg: mem+swap controller core This patch implements per cgroup limit for usage of memory+swap. However there are SwapCache, double counting of swap-cache and swap-entry is avoided. Mem+Swap controller works as following. - memory usage is limited by memory.limit_in_bytes. - memory + swap usage is limited by memory.memsw_limit_in_bytes. This has following benefits. - A user can limit total resource usage of mem+swap. Without this, because memory resource controller doesn't take care of usage of swap, a process can exhaust all the swap (by memory leak.) We can avoid this case. And Swap is shared resource but it cannot be reclaimed (goes back to memory) until it's used. This characteristic can be trouble when the memory is divided into some parts by cpuset or memcg. Assume group A and group B. After some application executes, the system can be.. Group A -- very large free memory space but occupy 99% of swap. Group B -- under memory shortage but cannot use swap...it's nearly full. Ability to set appropriate swap limit for each group is required. Maybe someone wonder "why not swap but mem+swap ?" - The global LRU(kswapd) can swap out arbitrary pages. Swap-out means to move account from memory to swap...there is no change in usage of mem+swap. In other words, when we want to limit the usage of swap without affecting global LRU, mem+swap limit is better than just limiting swap. Accounting target information is stored in swap_cgroup which is per swap entry record. Charge is done as following. map - charge page and memsw. unmap - uncharge page/memsw if not SwapCache. swap-out (__delete_from_swap_cache) - uncharge page - record mem_cgroup information to swap_cgroup. swap-in (do_swap_page) - charged as page and memsw. record in swap_cgroup is cleared. memsw accounting is decremented. swap-free (swap_free()) - if swap entry is freed, memsw is uncharged by PAGE_SIZE. There are people work under never-swap environments and consider swap as something bad. For such people, this mem+swap controller extension is just an overhead. This overhead is avoided by config or boot option. (see Kconfig. detail is not in this patch.) TODO: - maybe more optimization can be don in swap-in path. (but not very safe.) But we just do simple accounting at this stage. [nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp: make resize limit hold mutex] [hugh@veritas.com: memswap controller core swapcache fixes] Signed-off-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com> Cc: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com> Cc: Balbir Singh <balbir@in.ibm.com> Cc: Pavel Emelyanov <xemul@openvz.org> Signed-off-by: Daisuke Nishimura <nishimura@mxp.nes.nec.co.jp> Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2009-01-08 02:08:00 +00:00
Charges recorded in swap information is not updated at removal of cgroup.
Recorded information is discarded and a cgroup which uses swap (swapcache)
will be charged as a new owner of it.
5. Misc. interfaces.
5.1 force_empty
memory.force_empty interface is provided to make cgroup's memory usage empty.
You can use this interface only when the cgroup has no tasks.
When writing anything to this
# echo 0 > memory.force_empty
Almost all pages tracked by this memcg will be unmapped and freed. Some of
pages cannot be freed because it's locked or in-use. Such pages are moved
to parent and this cgroup will be empty. But this may return -EBUSY in
some too busy case.
Typical use case of this interface is that calling this before rmdir().
Because rmdir() moves all pages to parent, some out-of-use page caches can be
moved to the parent. If you want to avoid that, force_empty will be useful.
6. TODO
1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller)
2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first
3. Teach controller to account for shared-pages
4. Start reclamation in the background when the limit is
not yet hit but the usage is getting closer
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/2007/4/9/78
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 test results,
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/19/36
11. Singh, Balbir. Memory controller introduction (v6),
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/17/69
12. Corbet, Jonathan, Controlling memory use in cgroups,
http://lwn.net/Articles/243795/