[PATCH v3 02/11] memcg: document cgroup dirty memory interfaces

Greg Thelen
2010-10-19T00:40:50Z

Document cgroup dirty memory interfaces and statistics.

Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <arighi@develer.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Thelen <gthelen@google.com>
---

Changelog since v1:
- Renamed "nfs"/"total_nfs" to "nfs_unstable"/"total_nfs_unstable" in per cgroup
memory.stat to match /proc/meminfo.

- Allow [kKmMgG] suffixes for newly created dirty limit value cgroupfs files.

- Describe a situation where a cgroup can exceed its dirty limit.

Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt | 60 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt b/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
index 7781857..02bbd6f 100644
--- a/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
+++ b/Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
@@ -385,6 +385,10 @@ mapped_file - # of bytes of mapped file (includes tmpfs/shmem)
pgpgin - # of pages paged in (equivalent to # of charging events).
pgpgout - # of pages paged out (equivalent to # of uncharging events).
swap - # of bytes of swap usage
+dirty - # of bytes that are waiting to get written back to the disk.
+writeback - # of bytes that are actively being written back to the disk.
+nfs_unstable - # of bytes sent to the NFS server, but not yet committed to
+ the actual storage.
inactive_anon - # of bytes of anonymous memory and swap cache memory on
LRU list.
active_anon - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory on active
@@ -453,6 +457,62 @@ memory under it will be reclaimed.
You can reset failcnt by writing 0 to failcnt file.
# echo 0 > .../memory.failcnt

+5.5 dirty memory
+
+Control the maximum amount of dirty pages a cgroup can have at any given time.
+
+Limiting dirty memory is like fixing the max amount of dirty (hard to reclaim)
+page cache used by a cgroup. So, in case of multiple cgroup writers, they will
+not be able to consume more than their designated share of dirty pages and will
+be forced to perform write-out if they cross that limit.
+
+The interface is equivalent to the procfs interface: /proc/sys/vm/dirty_*. It
+is possible to configure a limit to trigger both a direct writeback or a
+background writeback performed by per-bdi flusher threads. The root cgroup
+memory.dirty_* control files are read-only and match the contents of
+the /proc/sys/vm/dirty_* files.
+
+Per-cgroup dirty limits can be set using the following files in the cgroupfs:
+
+- memory.dirty_ratio: the amount of dirty memory (expressed as a percentage of
+ cgroup memory) at which a process generating dirty pages will itself start
+ writing out dirty data.
+
+- memory.dirty_limit_in_bytes: the amount of dirty memory (expressed in bytes)
+ in the cgroup at which a process generating dirty pages will start itself
+ writing out dirty data. Suffix (k, K, m, M, g, or G) can be used to indicate
+ that value is kilo, mega or gigabytes.
+
+ Note: memory.dirty_limit_in_bytes is the counterpart of memory.dirty_ratio.
+ Only one of them may be specified at a time. When one is written it is
+ immediately taken into account to evaluate the dirty memory limits and the
+ other appears as 0 when read.
+
+- memory.dirty_background_ratio: the amount of dirty memory of the cgroup
+ (expressed as a percentage of cgroup memory) at which background writeback
+ kernel threads will start writing out dirty data.
+
+- memory.dirty_background_limit_in_bytes: the amount of dirty memory (expressed
+ in bytes) in the cgroup at which background writeback kernel threads will
+ start writing out dirty data. Suffix (k, K, m, M, g, or G) can be used to
+ indicate that value is kilo, mega or gigabytes.
+
+ Note: memory.dirty_background_limit_in_bytes is the counterpart of
+ memory.dirty_background_ratio. Only one of them may be specified at a time.
+ When one is written it is immediately taken into account to evaluate the dirty
+ memory limits and the other appears as 0 when read.
+
+A cgroup may contain more dirty memory than its dirty limit. This is possible
+because of the principle that the first cgroup to touch a page is charged for
+it. Subsequent page counting events (dirty, writeback, nfs_unstable) are also
+counted to the originally charged cgroup.
+
+Example: If page is allocated by a cgroup A task, then the page is charged to
+cgroup A. If the page is later dirtied by a task in cgroup B, then the cgroup A
+dirty count will be incremented. If cgroup A is over its dirty limit but cgroup
+B is not, then dirtying a cgroup A page from a cgroup B task may push cgroup A
+over its dirty limit without throttling the dirtying cgroup B task.
+
6. Hierarchy support

The memory controller supports a deep hierarchy and hierarchical accounting.
--
1.7.1