Re: [RFC][PATCH -mm 0/5] cgroup: block device i/o controller (v9)

[Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>]

Hirokazu Takahashi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>>> TODO:
>>>>
>>>> * Try to push down the throttling and implement it directly in the I/O
>>>>   schedulers, using bio-cgroup (http://people.valinux.co.jp/~ryov/bio-cgroup/)
>>>>   to keep track of the right cgroup context. This approach could lead to more
>>>>   memory consumption and increases the number of dirty pages (hard/slow to
>>>>   reclaim pages) in the system, since dirty-page ratio in memory is not
>>>>   limited. This could even lead to potential OOM conditions, but these problems
>>>>   can be resolved directly into the memory cgroup subsystem
>>>>
>>>> * Handle I/O generated by kswapd: at the moment there's no control on the I/O
>>>>   generated by kswapd; try to use the page_cgroup functionality of the memory
>>>>   cgroup controller to track this kind of I/O and charge the right cgroup when
>>>>   pages are swapped in/out
>>> FYI, this also can be done with bio-cgroup, which determine the owner cgroup
>>> of a given anonymous page.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Hirokazu Takahashi
>> That would be great! FYI here is how I would like to proceed:
>>
>> - today I'll post a new version of my cgroup-io-throttle patch rebased
>>   to 2.6.27-rc5-mm1 (it's well tested and seems to be stable enough).
>>   To keep the things light and simpler I've implemented custom
>>   get_cgroup_from_page() / put_cgroup_from_page() in the memory
>>   controller to retrieve the owner of a page, holding a reference to the
>>   corresponding memcg, during async writes in submit_bio(); this is not
>>   probably the best way to proceed, and a more generic framework like
>>   bio-cgroup sounds better, but it seems to work quite well. The only
>>   problem I've found is that during swap_writepage() the page is not
>>   assigned to any page_cgroup (page_get_page_cgroup() returns NULL), and
> 
> This behavior depends on the version of memory-cgroup.
> In the previous version, pages in the swap cache were owned by one of
> the cgroups.
> 
> Kamezawa-san, one of the implementer, told me he got this feature off
> temporarily and he was going to turn it on again. I think this
> workaround is chosen because the current implementation of memory
> cgroup has a weak point under memory pressure.
> 
>>   so I'm not able to charge the cost of this I/O operation to the right
>>   cgroup. Does bio-cgroup address or even resolve this issue?
> 
> Bio-cgroup can't support pages in the swap cache temporarily with the
> current linux kernel either since it shares the same infrastructure
> with memory-cgroup.
> 
> Now, they have just started to rewrite the infrastructure to track pages
> with page_cgroup, which is going to give us good performance ever.
> After that I'm going to enhance bio-cgroup more, such as dirty page
> tracking. To tell the truth, I already have dirty pages tracking patch
> for the current linux in my hand, which isn't posted yet. I'm going to
> port it on the new infrastructure.
> 
> If memory cgroup team change their mind, I will implement swap-pages
> tracking in bio-cgroup.

Very good! in any case it seems I'll get the tracking of swap-pages from
someone else.. so I don't have to change/implement anything in my
io-throttle patchset. :)

I'll start to use bio-cgroup in io-throttle ASAP and do some tests. I'll
keep you informed.

Thanks,
-Andrea