[Devel] Re: [RFC][PATCH 2/7] RSS controller core

[Herbert Poetzl]

On Sun, Mar 11, 2007 at 12:08:16PM +0300, Pavel Emelianov wrote:
> Herbert Poetzl wrote:
>> On Tue, Mar 06, 2007 at 02:00:36PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
>>> On Tue, 06 Mar 2007 17:55:29 +0300
>>> Pavel Emelianov <xemul at sw.ru> wrote:
>>>
>>>> +struct rss_container {
>>>> +	struct res_counter res;
>>>> +	struct list_head page_list;
>>>> +	struct container_subsys_state css;
>>>> +};
>>>> +
>>>> +struct page_container {
>>>> +	struct page *page;
>>>> +	struct rss_container *cnt;
>>>> +	struct list_head list;
>>>> +};
>>> ah. This looks good. I'll find a hunk of time to go through this
>>> work and through Paul's patches. It'd be good to get both patchsets
>>> lined up in -mm within a couple of weeks. But..
>> 
>> doesn't look so good for me, mainly becaus of the 
>> additional per page data and per page processing
>> 
>> on 4GB memory, with 100 guests, 50% shared for each
>> guest, this basically means ~1mio pages, 500k shared
>> and 1500k x sizeof(page_container) entries, which
>> roughly boils down to ~25MB of wasted memory ...
>> 
>> increase the amount of shared pages and it starts
>> getting worse, but maybe I'm missing something here
> 
> You are. Each page has only one page_container associated
> with it despite the number of containers it is shared
> between.
> 
>>> We need to decide whether we want to do per-container memory
>>> limitation via these data structures, or whether we do it via
>>> a physical scan of some software zone, possibly based on Mel's
>>> patches.
>> 
>> why not do simple page accounting (as done currently
>> in Linux) and use that for the limits, without
>> keeping the reference from container to page?
> 
> As I've already answered in my previous letter simple
> limiting w/o per-container reclamation and per-container
> oom killer isn't a good memory management. It doesn't allow
> to handle resource shortage gracefully.

per container OOM killer does not require any container
page reference, you know _what_ tasks belong to the 
container, and you know their _badness_ from the normal
OOM calculations, so doing them for a container is really
straight forward without having any page 'tagging'

for the reclamation part, please elaborate how that will
differ in a (shared memory) guest from what the kernel
currently does ...

TIA,
Herbert

> This patchset provides more grace way to handle this, but
> full memory management includes accounting of VMA-length
> as well (returning ENOMEM from system call) but we've decided
> to start with RSS.
> 
>> best,
>> Herbert
>> 
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