Re: [patch00/05]: Containers(V2)- Introduction

Nick Piggin
2006-09-20T17:00:37Z

(this time to the lists as well)

Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> I'd much rather containterize the whole reclaim code, which should not
> be too hard since he already adds a container pointer to struct page.

Yes, and I tend to agree with you. I probably wasn't clear, but I was
mainly talking about just the memory resource tracking part of this
patchset.

I am less willing to make a judgement about reclaim, because I don't
know very much about the workloads or the guarantees they attempt to
provide.

> Esp. when we get some of my page reclaim abstractions merged, moving the
> reclaim from struct zone to a container is not a lot of work. (this is
> basically what one of the ckrm mm policies did too)

I do agree that it would be nicer to not have a completely different
scheme for doing their own page reclaim, but rather use the existing
code (*provided* that it is designed in the same, minimally intrusive
manner as the page tracking).

I can understand how it is attractive to create a new subsystem to
solve a particular problem, but once it is in the kernel it has to be
maintained regardless, so if it can be done in a way that shares more
of the current infrastructure (nicely) then that would be a better
solution.

I like that they're investigating the use of memory nodes for this.
It seems like the logical starting place.

> I still have to reread what Rohit does for file backed pages, that gave
> my head a spin.
> I've been thinking a bit on that problem, and it would be possible to
> share all address_space pages equally between attached containers, this
> would lose some accuracy, since one container could read 10% of the file
> and another 90%, but I don't think that is a common scenario.

Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I don't think really complex schemes
are needed... but again I might need more knowledge of their workloads
and problems.

--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.
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