Re: [RFD] Task counter: cgroup core feature or cgroup subsystem? (was Re: [PATCH 0/8 v3] cgroups: Task counter subsystem)

Frederic Weisbecker
2011-08-27T13:40:46Z

On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 08:16:32AM -0700, Paul Menage wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 10:54 AM, Frederic Weisbecker
> <fweisbec@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > It seems your patch doesn't handle the ->fork() and ->exit() calls.
> > We probably need a quick access to states of multi-subsystems from
> > the task, some lists available from task->cgroups, I don't know yet.
> >
>
> That state is available, but currently only while holding cgroup_mutex
> - at least, that's what task_cgroup_from_root() requires.
>
> It might be the case that we could achieve the same effect by just
> locking the task, so the pre-condition for task_cgroup_from_root()
> would be either that cgroup_mutex is held or the task lock is held.
>
> We could extend the signature of cgroup_subsys.fork to include a
> reference to the cgroup; for the singly-bindable subsystems this would
> be trivially available via task->cgroups; for the multi-bindable
> subsystems then for each hierarchy that the subsystem is mounted on
> we'd call task_cgroup_from_root() to get the cgroup for that
> hierarchy. So multi-bindable subsystems with fork/exit callbacks would
> get called once for each mounted instance of the subsystem.
>
> This would still make the task counter subsystem a bit painful - it
> would read_lock a global rwlock (css_set_lock) on every fork/exit in
> order to find the cgroup to charge/uncharge. I'm not sure how painful
> that would be on a big system. If that were a noticeable performance
> problem, we could have a variable-length extension on the end of
> css_set that contains a list of hierarchy_index/cgroup pairs for any
> hierarchies that had multi-bindable subsystems (or maybe for all
> hierarchies, for simplicity). This would make creating a css_set a
> little bit more complicated, but overall shouldn't be too painful, and
> would make the problem of finding a cgroup for a given hierarchy
> trivial.

Oh you're right. My first idea was to reference multi-bindable
subsystem states in cgroup_subsys_state, like it's done currently
for singletons subsystems. But this indeed require cgroup_mutex
or task_lock. And only the last one look sensible in fork/exit path.
And if that becomes a scalability problem we can still have a
dedicated lock for cgroup attach/detach on tasks.

Whatever we do, we need that lock. So we can pick your
solution that references cgroups that belong to multi-bindable
subsystems for a given task in css_set, or we can have tsk->cgroups->subsys[]
a variable size array that references 1 * singletons and N * multi
bindable subsystems, N beeing the number of hierarchies that use
a given subsystem.

What do you think?