On 02/28/2012 08:07 PM, Suleiman Souhlal wrote:
On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 5:31 AM, Glauber Costa<glommer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don't fully understand this.
To me, the whole purpose of having a cache tied to a memcg, is that we know
all allocations from that particular cache should be billed to a specific
memcg. So after a cache is created, and has an assigned memcg,
what's the point in bypassing it to root?
It smells like you're just using this to circumvent something...
In the vast majority of the cases, we will be able to account to the cgroup.
However, there are cases when __mem_cgroup_try_charge() is not able to
do so, like when the task is being killed.
When this happens, the allocation will not get accounted to the
cgroup, but the slab accounting code will still think the page belongs
to the memcg's kmem_cache.
So, when we go to free the page, we assume that the page belongs to
the memcg and uncharge it, even though it was never charged to us in
the first place.
This is the situation this patch is trying to address, by keeping a
counter of how much memory has been bypassed like this, and uncharging
from the root if we have any outstanding bypassed memory.
Does that make sense?
Yes, but how about the following:
I had a similar problem in tcp accounting, and solved that by adding
res_counter_charge_nofail().
I actually implemented something very similar to your bypass (now that I
understand it better...) and gave up in favor of this.
The tcp code has its particularities, but still, that could work okay
for the general slab.
Reason being:
Consider you have a limit of X, and is currently at X-1. You bypassed a
page.
So in reality, you should fail the next allocation, but you will not -
(unless you start considering the bypassed memory at allocation time as
well).
If you use res_counter_charge_nofail(), you will:
1) Still proceed with the allocations that shouldn't fail - so no
difference here
2) fail the normal allocations if you have "bypassed" memory filling
up your limit
3) all that without coupling something alien to the res_counter API.
--
To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in
the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM,
see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ .
Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/
Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>