cgroup: implement cgroup.populated for the default hierarchy
cgroup users often need a way to determine when a cgroup's subhierarchy becomes empty so that it can be cleaned up. cgroup currently provides release_agent for it; unfortunately, this mechanism is riddled with issues. * It delivers events by forking and execing a userland binary specified as the release_agent. This is a long deprecated method of notification delivery. It's extremely heavy, slow and cumbersome to integrate with larger infrastructure. * There is single monitoring point at the root. There's no way to delegate management of a subtree. * The event isn't recursive. It triggers when a cgroup doesn't have any tasks or child cgroups. Events for internal nodes trigger only after all children are removed. This again makes it impossible to delegate management of a subtree. * Events are filtered from the kernel side. "notify_on_release" file is used to subscribe to or suppress release event. This is unnecessarily complicated and probably done this way because event delivery itself was expensive. This patch implements interface file "cgroup.populated" which can be used to monitor whether the cgroup's subhierarchy has tasks in it or not. Its value is 0 if there is no task in the cgroup and its descendants; otherwise, 1, and kernfs_notify() notificaiton is triggers when the value changes, which can be monitored through poll and [di]notify. This is a lot ligther and simpler and trivially allows delegating management of subhierarchy - subhierarchy monitoring can block further propgation simply by putting itself or another process in the root of the subhierarchy and monitor events that it's interested in from there without interfering with monitoring higher in the tree. v2: Patch description updated as per Serge. v3: "cgroup.subtree_populated" renamed to "cgroup.populated". The subtree_ prefix was a bit confusing because "cgroup.subtree_control" uses it to denote the tree rooted at the cgroup sans the cgroup itself while the populated state includes the cgroup itself. Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@ubuntu.com> Acked-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@huawei.com> Cc: Lennart Poettering <lennart@poettering.net>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment