Re: Resource Management Requirements (was "[RFC] CPU controllers?")

[Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@in.ibm.com>]

On Mon, Jun 19, 2006 at 12:03:23PM -0700, Chandra Seetharaman wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-06-18 at 17:28 +1000, Nick Piggin wrote:
> 
> > OK... let me put it more clearly. What are the requirements?

At a very broad-level, all the requirements pointed by Chandra below boil down 
to the requirement of providing guaranteed CPU usage for a group of 
tasks and the ability of limiting (hard or soft) CPU usage of other group of 
tasks.

At a finer-level, this broad requirement could be interpreted and implemented 
in a number of ways (ex: by having kernel support only task-level limit and
implementing group-level in user-space etc) and thats what this RFC was
about - to discuss what minimal kernel support would be needed to
support the above broad requirement!

> Nick,
> 
> Here are some requirements we(Resource Groups aka CKRM) are working
> towards (Note that this is not limited to CPU alone):
> 
> In a enterprise environment:
>  - Ability to group applications into their importance levels and assign
>    appropriate amount of resources to them.
>  - In case of server consolidation, ability to allocate and control
>    resources to a specific group of applications. Ability to 
>    account/charge according to their usages.
>  - manage multiple departments in a single OS instance with ability to
>    allocate and control resources department wise (similar to above
>    requirement :)
>  - ability to guarantee "time to complete" for a specific user
>    request (by controlling resource usage starting from the web server
>    to the database server).
>  - In case of ISPs and ASPs, ability to guarantee/limit usages to 
>    independent clients (in a single OS instance). 
>  - Ability to control runaway processes from bringing down the system 
>    response (DoS attacks, fork bombs etc.,)
>   
> In a university environment (can be treated as a subset of enterprise
> requirements above):
>  - Ability to limit resource consumption at individual user level.
>  - Ability to control runaway processes.
>  - Ability for a user to manage resources allocated to them (as 
>    explained in the desktop environment below). 
> 
> In a desktop environment:
>  - Ability to control resource usage of a set of applications 
>    (ex: infamous updatedb issue).
>  - Ability to run different loads and get the expected result (like 
>    checking emails or browsing Internet while compilation is in 
>    progress) 
> 
> Generic:
> Provide these resource management capabilities with less overhead on
> overall system performance.

-- 
Regards,
vatsa