On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 03:43:46AM -0800, Anton Vorontsov wrote: > On Wed, Nov 07, 2012 at 01:21:36PM +0200, Kirill A. Shutemov wrote: > [...] > > Sorry, I didn't follow previous discussion on this, but could you > > explain what's wrong with memory notifications from memcg? > > As I can see you can get pretty similar functionality using memory > > thresholds on the root cgroup. What's the point? > > There are a few reasons we don't use cgroup notifications: > > 1. We're not interested in the absolute number of pages/KB of available > memory, as provided by cgroup memory controller. What we're interested > in is the amount of easily reclaimable memory and new memory > allocations' cost. > > We can have plenty of "free" memory, of which say 90% will be caches, > and say 10% idle. But we do want to differentiate these types of memory > (although not going into details about it), i.e. we want to get > notified when kernel is reclaiming. And we also want to know when the > memory comes from swapping others' pages out (well, actually we don't > call it swap, it's "new allocations cost becomes high" -- it might be a > result of many factors (swapping, fragmentation, etc.) -- and userland > might analyze the situation when this happens). > > Exposing all the VM details to userland is not an option IIUC, you want MemFree + Buffers + Cached + SwapCached, right? It's already exposed to userspace. > -- it is not > possible to build a stable ABI on this. Plus, it makes it really hard > for userland to deal with all the low level details of Linux VM > internals. > > So, no, raw numbers of "free/used KBs" are not interesting at all. > > 1.5. But it is important to understand that vmpressure_fd() is not > orthogonal to cgroups (like it was with vmevent_fd()). We want it to > be "cgroup'able" too. :) But optionally. > > 2. The last time I checked, cgroups memory controller did not (and I guess > still does not) not account kernel-owned slabs. I asked several times > why so, but nobody answered. Almost there. Glauber works on it. -- Kirill A. Shutemov -- 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/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>