• Roman Gushchin's avatar
    memcg: introduce memory.min · bf8d5d52
    Roman Gushchin authored
    Memory controller implements the memory.low best-effort memory
    protection mechanism, which works perfectly in many cases and allows
    protecting working sets of important workloads from sudden reclaim.
    
    But its semantics has a significant limitation: it works only as long as
    there is a supply of reclaimable memory.  This makes it pretty useless
    against any sort of slow memory leaks or memory usage increases.  This
    is especially true for swapless systems.  If swap is enabled, memory
    soft protection effectively postpones problems, allowing a leaking
    application to fill all swap area, which makes no sense.  The only
    effective way to guarantee the memory protection in this case is to
    invoke the OOM killer.
    
    It's possible to handle this case in userspace by reacting on MEMCG_LOW
    events; but there is still a place for a fail-safe in-kernel mechanism
    to provide stronger guarantees.
    
    This patch introduces the memory.min interface for cgroup v2 memory
    controller.  It works very similarly to memory.low (sharing the same
    hierarchical behavior), except that it's not disabled if there is no
    more reclaimable memory in the system.
    
    If cgroup is not populated, its memory.min is ignored, because otherwise
    even the OOM killer wouldn't be able to reclaim the protected memory,
    and the system can stall.
    
    [guro@fb.com: s/low/min/ in docs]
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180510130758.GA9129@castle.DHCP.thefacebook.com
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180509180734.GA4856@castle.DHCP.thefacebook.comSigned-off-by: default avatarRoman Gushchin <guro@fb.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarRandy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarJohannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
    Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
    Cc: Vladimir Davydov <vdavydov.dev@gmail.com>
    Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    bf8d5d52
cgroup-v2.rst 73.6 KB