From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756414AbYKDXgd (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Nov 2008 18:36:33 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1753759AbYKDXgZ (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Nov 2008 18:36:25 -0500 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:48093 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752192AbYKDXgY (ORCPT ); Tue, 4 Nov 2008 18:36:24 -0500 Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 15:36:10 -0800 From: Andrew Morton To: Christoph Lameter Cc: peterz@infradead.org, rientjes@google.com, npiggin@suse.de, menage@google.com, dfults@sgi.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, containers@lists.osdl.org Subject: Re: [patch 0/7] cpuset writeback throttling Message-Id: <20081104153610.bbfd5ed8.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20081104124753.fb1dde5a.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <1225831988.7803.1939.camel@twins> <20081104131637.68fbe055.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <1225833710.7803.1993.camel@twins> <20081104135004.f1717fcf.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20081104143534.b5c16147.akpm@linux-foundation.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.4 (GTK+ 2.8.20; i486-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 4 Nov 2008 16:52:48 -0600 (CST) Christoph Lameter wrote: > On Tue, 4 Nov 2008, Andrew Morton wrote: > > > To fix this with a memcg-based throttling, the operator would need to > > be able to create memcg's which have pages only from particular nodes. > > (That's a bit indirect relative to what they want to do, but is > > presumably workable). > > The system would need to have the capability to find the memcg groups that > have dirty pages for a certain inode. Files are not constrained to nodes > or memcg groups. Ah, we're talking about different things. In a memcg implementation what we would implement is "throttle page-dirtying tasks in this memcg when the memcg's dirty memory reaches 40% of its total". But that doesn't solve the problem which this patchset is trying to solve, which is "don't let all the memory in all this group of nodes get dirty". Yes? Someone help me out here. I don't yet have my head around the overlaps and incompatibilities here. Perhaps the containers guys will wake up and put their thinking caps on? What happens if cpuset A uses nodes 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and cpuset B uses nodes 0,1? Can activity in cpuset A cause ooms in cpuset B?