Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/4] CFS Bandwidth Control

[Bharata B Rao <bharata@linux.vnet.ibm.com>]

On Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 06:54:52PM -0800, Paul Turner wrote:
> 
> The skeleton of our approach is as follows:
> - As above we maintain a global pool, per-tg, pool of unassigned quota.  On it
>   we track the bandwidth period, quota per period, and runtime remaining in
>   the current period.  As bandwidth is used within a period it is decremented
>   from runtime.  Runtime is currently synchronized using a spinlock, in the
>   current implementation there's no reason this couldn't be done using
>   atomic ops instead however the spinlock allows for a little more flexibility
>   in experimentation with other schemes.
> - When a cfs_rq participating in a bandwidth constrained task_group executes
>   it acquires time in sysctl_sched_cfs_bandwidth_slice (default currently
>   10ms) size chunks from the global pool, this synchronizes under rq->lock and
>   is part of the update_curr path.
> - Throttled entities are dequeued immediately (as opposed to delaying this
>   operation to the put path), this avoids some potentially poor load-balancer
>   interactions and preserves the 'verbage' of the put_task semantic.
>   Throttled entities are gated from participating in the tree at the
>   {enqueue, dequeue}_entity level.  They are also skipped for load
>   balance in the same manner as Bharatta's patch-series employs.

I did defer the dequeue until next put because walking the se hierarchy
multiple times (from update_curr -> dequeue_entity -> update_curr) appeared
too complex when I started with it.

> 
> Interface:
> ----------
> Two new cgroupfs files are added to the cpu subsystem:
> - cpu.cfs_period_us : period over which bandwidth is to be regulated
> - cpu.cfs_quota_us  : bandwidth available for consumption per period
> 
> One important interface change that this introduces (versus the rate limits
> proposal) is that the defined bandwidth becomes an absolute quantifier.
> 
> e.g. a bandwidth of 5 seconds (cpu.cfs_quota_us=5000000) on a period of 1 second
> (cpu.cfs_period_us=1000000) would result in 5 wall seconds of cpu time being
> consumable every 1 wall second.

As I have said earlier, I would like to hear what others say about this
interface. Especially from Linux-vserver project since it is already
using the cfs hard limit patches in their test release. Herbert ?

Thanks for your work. More later when I review the individual patches
in detail.

Regards,
Bharata.