FreeBSD/Linux Kernel Cross Reference
sys/Documentation/cgroups.txt

                                     CGROUPS
                                     -------
     
     Written by Paul Menage <menage@google.com> based on Documentation/cpusets.txt
     
     Original copyright statements from cpusets.txt:
     Portions Copyright (C) 2004 BULL SA.
     Portions Copyright (c) 2004-2006 Silicon Graphics, Inc.
     Modified by Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
    Modified by Christoph Lameter <clameter@sgi.com>
    
    CONTENTS:
    =========
    
    1. Control Groups
      1.1 What are cgroups ?
      1.2 Why are cgroups needed ?
      1.3 How are cgroups implemented ?
      1.4 What does notify_on_release do ?
      1.5 How do I use cgroups ?
    2. Usage Examples and Syntax
      2.1 Basic Usage
      2.2 Attaching processes
    3. Kernel API
      3.1 Overview
      3.2 Synchronization
      3.3 Subsystem API
    4. Questions
    
    1. Control Groups
    =================
    
    1.1 What are cgroups ?
    ----------------------
    
    Control Groups provide a mechanism for aggregating/partitioning sets of
    tasks, and all their future children, into hierarchical groups with
    specialized behaviour.
    
    Definitions:
    
    A *cgroup* associates a set of tasks with a set of parameters for one
    or more subsystems.
    
    A *subsystem* is a module that makes use of the task grouping
    facilities provided by cgroups to treat groups of tasks in
    particular ways. A subsystem is typically a "resource controller" that
    schedules a resource or applies per-cgroup limits, but it may be
    anything that wants to act on a group of processes, e.g. a
    virtualization subsystem.
    
    A *hierarchy* is a set of cgroups arranged in a tree, such that
    every task in the system is in exactly one of the cgroups in the
    hierarchy, and a set of subsystems; each subsystem has system-specific
    state attached to each cgroup in the hierarchy.  Each hierarchy has
    an instance of the cgroup virtual filesystem associated with it.
    
    At any one time there may be multiple active hierachies of task
    cgroups. Each hierarchy is a partition of all tasks in the system.
    
    User level code may create and destroy cgroups by name in an
    instance of the cgroup virtual file system, specify and query to
    which cgroup a task is assigned, and list the task pids assigned to
    a cgroup. Those creations and assignments only affect the hierarchy
    associated with that instance of the cgroup file system.
    
    On their own, the only use for cgroups is for simple job
    tracking. The intention is that other subsystems hook into the generic
    cgroup support to provide new attributes for cgroups, such as
    accounting/limiting the resources which processes in a cgroup can
    access. For example, cpusets (see Documentation/cpusets.txt) allows
    you to associate a set of CPUs and a set of memory nodes with the
    tasks in each cgroup.
    
    1.2 Why are cgroups needed ?
    ----------------------------
    
    There are multiple efforts to provide process aggregations in the
    Linux kernel, mainly for resource tracking purposes. Such efforts
    include cpusets, CKRM/ResGroups, UserBeanCounters, and virtual server
    namespaces. These all require the basic notion of a
    grouping/partitioning of processes, with newly forked processes ending
    in the same group (cgroup) as their parent process.
    
    The kernel cgroup patch provides the minimum essential kernel
    mechanisms required to efficiently implement such groups. It has
    minimal impact on the system fast paths, and provides hooks for
    specific subsystems such as cpusets to provide additional behaviour as
    desired.
    
    Multiple hierarchy support is provided to allow for situations where
    the division of tasks into cgroups is distinctly different for
    different subsystems - having parallel hierarchies allows each
    hierarchy to be a natural division of tasks, without having to handle
    complex combinations of tasks that would be present if several
    unrelated subsystems needed to be forced into the same tree of
    cgroups.
    
    At one extreme, each resource controller or subsystem could be in a
   separate hierarchy; at the other extreme, all subsystems
   would be attached to the same hierarchy.
   
   As an example of a scenario (originally proposed by vatsa@in.ibm.com)
   that can benefit from multiple hierarchies, consider a large
   university server with various users - students, professors, system
   tasks etc. The resource planning for this server could be along the
   following lines:
   
          CPU :           Top cpuset
                          /       \
                  CPUSet1         CPUSet2
                     |              |
                  (Profs)         (Students)
   
                  In addition (system tasks) are attached to topcpuset (so
                  that they can run anywhere) with a limit of 20%
   
          Memory : Professors (50%), students (30%), system (20%)
   
          Disk : Prof (50%), students (30%), system (20%)
   
          Network : WWW browsing (20%), Network File System (60%), others (20%)
                                  / \
                          Prof (15%) students (5%)
   
   Browsers like firefox/lynx go into the WWW network class, while (k)nfsd go
   into NFS network class.
   
   At the same time firefox/lynx will share an appropriate CPU/Memory class
   depending on who launched it (prof/student).
   
   With the ability to classify tasks differently for different resources
   (by putting those resource subsystems in different hierarchies) then
   the admin can easily set up a script which receives exec notifications
   and depending on who is launching the browser he can
   
          # echo browser_pid > /mnt/<restype>/<userclass>/tasks
   
   With only a single hierarchy, he now would potentially have to create
   a separate cgroup for every browser launched and associate it with
   approp network and other resource class.  This may lead to
   proliferation of such cgroups.
   
   Also lets say that the administrator would like to give enhanced network
   access temporarily to a student's browser (since it is night and the user
   wants to do online gaming :))  OR give one of the students simulation
   apps enhanced CPU power,
   
   With ability to write pids directly to resource classes, it's just a
   matter of :
   
          # echo pid > /mnt/network/<new_class>/tasks
          (after some time)
          # echo pid > /mnt/network/<orig_class>/tasks
   
   Without this ability, he would have to split the cgroup into
   multiple separate ones and then associate the new cgroups with the
   new resource classes.
   
   
   
   1.3 How are cgroups implemented ?
   ---------------------------------
   
   Control Groups extends the kernel as follows:
   
    - Each task in the system has a reference-counted pointer to a
      css_set.
   
    - A css_set contains a set of reference-counted pointers to
      cgroup_subsys_state objects, one for each cgroup subsystem
      registered in the system. There is no direct link from a task to
      the cgroup of which it's a member in each hierarchy, but this
      can be determined by following pointers through the
      cgroup_subsys_state objects. This is because accessing the
      subsystem state is something that's expected to happen frequently
      and in performance-critical code, whereas operations that require a
      task's actual cgroup assignments (in particular, moving between
      cgroups) are less common. A linked list runs through the cg_list
      field of each task_struct using the css_set, anchored at
      css_set->tasks.
   
    - A cgroup hierarchy filesystem can be mounted  for browsing and
      manipulation from user space.
   
    - You can list all the tasks (by pid) attached to any cgroup.
   
   The implementation of cgroups requires a few, simple hooks
   into the rest of the kernel, none in performance critical paths:
   
    - in init/main.c, to initialize the root cgroups and initial
      css_set at system boot.
   
    - in fork and exit, to attach and detach a task from its css_set.
   
   In addition a new file system, of type "cgroup" may be mounted, to
   enable browsing and modifying the cgroups presently known to the
   kernel.  When mounting a cgroup hierarchy, you may specify a
   comma-separated list of subsystems to mount as the filesystem mount
   options.  By default, mounting the cgroup filesystem attempts to
   mount a hierarchy containing all registered subsystems.
   
   If an active hierarchy with exactly the same set of subsystems already
   exists, it will be reused for the new mount. If no existing hierarchy
   matches, and any of the requested subsystems are in use in an existing
   hierarchy, the mount will fail with -EBUSY. Otherwise, a new hierarchy
   is activated, associated with the requested subsystems.
   
   It's not currently possible to bind a new subsystem to an active
   cgroup hierarchy, or to unbind a subsystem from an active cgroup
   hierarchy. This may be possible in future, but is fraught with nasty
   error-recovery issues.
   
   When a cgroup filesystem is unmounted, if there are any
   child cgroups created below the top-level cgroup, that hierarchy
   will remain active even though unmounted; if there are no
   child cgroups then the hierarchy will be deactivated.
   
   No new system calls are added for cgroups - all support for
   querying and modifying cgroups is via this cgroup file system.
   
   Each task under /proc has an added file named 'cgroup' displaying,
   for each active hierarchy, the subsystem names and the cgroup name
   as the path relative to the root of the cgroup file system.
   
   Each cgroup is represented by a directory in the cgroup file system
   containing the following files describing that cgroup:
   
    - tasks: list of tasks (by pid) attached to that cgroup
    - releasable flag: cgroup currently removeable?
    - notify_on_release flag: run the release agent on exit?
    - release_agent: the path to use for release notifications (this file
      exists in the top cgroup only)
   
   Other subsystems such as cpusets may add additional files in each
   cgroup dir.
   
   New cgroups are created using the mkdir system call or shell
   command.  The properties of a cgroup, such as its flags, are
   modified by writing to the appropriate file in that cgroups
   directory, as listed above.
   
   The named hierarchical structure of nested cgroups allows partitioning
   a large system into nested, dynamically changeable, "soft-partitions".
   
   The attachment of each task, automatically inherited at fork by any
   children of that task, to a cgroup allows organizing the work load
   on a system into related sets of tasks.  A task may be re-attached to
   any other cgroup, if allowed by the permissions on the necessary
   cgroup file system directories.
   
   When a task is moved from one cgroup to another, it gets a new
   css_set pointer - if there's an already existing css_set with the
   desired collection of cgroups then that group is reused, else a new
   css_set is allocated. Note that the current implementation uses a
   linear search to locate an appropriate existing css_set, so isn't
   very efficient. A future version will use a hash table for better
   performance.
   
   To allow access from a cgroup to the css_sets (and hence tasks)
   that comprise it, a set of cg_cgroup_link objects form a lattice;
   each cg_cgroup_link is linked into a list of cg_cgroup_links for
   a single cgroup on its cgrp_link_list field, and a list of
   cg_cgroup_links for a single css_set on its cg_link_list.
   
   Thus the set of tasks in a cgroup can be listed by iterating over
   each css_set that references the cgroup, and sub-iterating over
   each css_set's task set.
   
   The use of a Linux virtual file system (vfs) to represent the
   cgroup hierarchy provides for a familiar permission and name space
   for cgroups, with a minimum of additional kernel code.
   
   1.4 What does notify_on_release do ?
   ------------------------------------
   
   If the notify_on_release flag is enabled (1) in a cgroup, then
   whenever the last task in the cgroup leaves (exits or attaches to
   some other cgroup) and the last child cgroup of that cgroup
   is removed, then the kernel runs the command specified by the contents
   of the "release_agent" file in that hierarchy's root directory,
   supplying the pathname (relative to the mount point of the cgroup
   file system) of the abandoned cgroup.  This enables automatic
   removal of abandoned cgroups.  The default value of
   notify_on_release in the root cgroup at system boot is disabled
   (0).  The default value of other cgroups at creation is the current
   value of their parents notify_on_release setting. The default value of
   a cgroup hierarchy's release_agent path is empty.
   
   1.5 How do I use cgroups ?
   --------------------------
   
   To start a new job that is to be contained within a cgroup, using
   the "cpuset" cgroup subsystem, the steps are something like:
   
    1) mkdir /dev/cgroup
    2) mount -t cgroup -ocpuset cpuset /dev/cgroup
    3) Create the new cgroup by doing mkdir's and write's (or echo's) in
       the /dev/cgroup virtual file system.
    4) Start a task that will be the "founding father" of the new job.
    5) Attach that task to the new cgroup by writing its pid to the
       /dev/cgroup tasks file for that cgroup.
    6) fork, exec or clone the job tasks from this founding father task.
   
   For example, the following sequence of commands will setup a cgroup
   named "Charlie", containing just CPUs 2 and 3, and Memory Node 1,
   and then start a subshell 'sh' in that cgroup:
   
     mount -t cgroup cpuset -ocpuset /dev/cgroup
     cd /dev/cgroup
     mkdir Charlie
     cd Charlie
     /bin/echo 2-3 > cpuset.cpus
     /bin/echo 1 > cpuset.mems
     /bin/echo $$ > tasks
     sh
     # The subshell 'sh' is now running in cgroup Charlie
     # The next line should display '/Charlie'
     cat /proc/self/cgroup
   
   2. Usage Examples and Syntax
   ============================
   
   2.1 Basic Usage
   ---------------
   
   Creating, modifying, using the cgroups can be done through the cgroup
   virtual filesystem.
   
   To mount a cgroup hierarchy will all available subsystems, type:
   # mount -t cgroup xxx /dev/cgroup
   
   The "xxx" is not interpreted by the cgroup code, but will appear in
   /proc/mounts so may be any useful identifying string that you like.
   
   To mount a cgroup hierarchy with just the cpuset and numtasks
   subsystems, type:
   # mount -t cgroup -o cpuset,numtasks hier1 /dev/cgroup
   
   To change the set of subsystems bound to a mounted hierarchy, just
   remount with different options:
   
   # mount -o remount,cpuset,ns  /dev/cgroup
   
   Note that changing the set of subsystems is currently only supported
   when the hierarchy consists of a single (root) cgroup. Supporting
   the ability to arbitrarily bind/unbind subsystems from an existing
   cgroup hierarchy is intended to be implemented in the future.
   
   Then under /dev/cgroup you can find a tree that corresponds to the
   tree of the cgroups in the system. For instance, /dev/cgroup
   is the cgroup that holds the whole system.
   
   If you want to create a new cgroup under /dev/cgroup:
   # cd /dev/cgroup
   # mkdir my_cgroup
   
   Now you want to do something with this cgroup.
   # cd my_cgroup
   
   In this directory you can find several files:
   # ls
   notify_on_release releasable tasks
   (plus whatever files added by the attached subsystems)
   
   Now attach your shell to this cgroup:
   # /bin/echo $$ > tasks
   
   You can also create cgroups inside your cgroup by using mkdir in this
   directory.
   # mkdir my_sub_cs
   
   To remove a cgroup, just use rmdir:
   # rmdir my_sub_cs
   
   This will fail if the cgroup is in use (has cgroups inside, or
   has processes attached, or is held alive by other subsystem-specific
   reference).
   
   2.2 Attaching processes
   -----------------------
   
   # /bin/echo PID > tasks
   
   Note that it is PID, not PIDs. You can only attach ONE task at a time.
   If you have several tasks to attach, you have to do it one after another:
   
   # /bin/echo PID1 > tasks
   # /bin/echo PID2 > tasks
           ...
   # /bin/echo PIDn > tasks
   
   You can attach the current shell task by echoing 0:
   
   # echo 0 > tasks
   
   3. Kernel API
   =============
   
   3.1 Overview
   ------------
   
   Each kernel subsystem that wants to hook into the generic cgroup
   system needs to create a cgroup_subsys object. This contains
   various methods, which are callbacks from the cgroup system, along
   with a subsystem id which will be assigned by the cgroup system.
   
   Other fields in the cgroup_subsys object include:
   
   - subsys_id: a unique array index for the subsystem, indicating which
     entry in cgroup->subsys[] this subsystem should be managing.
   
   - name: should be initialized to a unique subsystem name. Should be
     no longer than MAX_CGROUP_TYPE_NAMELEN.
   
   - early_init: indicate if the subsystem needs early initialization
     at system boot.
   
   Each cgroup object created by the system has an array of pointers,
   indexed by subsystem id; this pointer is entirely managed by the
   subsystem; the generic cgroup code will never touch this pointer.
   
   3.2 Synchronization
   -------------------
   
   There is a global mutex, cgroup_mutex, used by the cgroup
   system. This should be taken by anything that wants to modify a
   cgroup. It may also be taken to prevent cgroups from being
   modified, but more specific locks may be more appropriate in that
   situation.
   
   See kernel/cgroup.c for more details.
   
   Subsystems can take/release the cgroup_mutex via the functions
   cgroup_lock()/cgroup_unlock().
   
   Accessing a task's cgroup pointer may be done in the following ways:
   - while holding cgroup_mutex
   - while holding the task's alloc_lock (via task_lock())
   - inside an rcu_read_lock() section via rcu_dereference()
   
   3.3 Subsystem API
   -----------------
   
   Each subsystem should:
   
   - add an entry in linux/cgroup_subsys.h
   - define a cgroup_subsys object called <name>_subsys
   
   Each subsystem may export the following methods. The only mandatory
   methods are create/destroy. Any others that are null are presumed to
   be successful no-ops.
   
   struct cgroup_subsys_state *create(struct cgroup_subsys *ss,
                                      struct cgroup *cgrp)
   (cgroup_mutex held by caller)
   
   Called to create a subsystem state object for a cgroup. The
   subsystem should allocate its subsystem state object for the passed
   cgroup, returning a pointer to the new object on success or a
   negative error code. On success, the subsystem pointer should point to
   a structure of type cgroup_subsys_state (typically embedded in a
   larger subsystem-specific object), which will be initialized by the
   cgroup system. Note that this will be called at initialization to
   create the root subsystem state for this subsystem; this case can be
   identified by the passed cgroup object having a NULL parent (since
   it's the root of the hierarchy) and may be an appropriate place for
   initialization code.
   
   void destroy(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cgrp)
   (cgroup_mutex held by caller)
   
   The cgroup system is about to destroy the passed cgroup; the subsystem
   should do any necessary cleanup and free its subsystem state
   object. By the time this method is called, the cgroup has already been
   unlinked from the file system and from the child list of its parent;
   cgroup->parent is still valid. (Note - can also be called for a
   newly-created cgroup if an error occurs after this subsystem's
   create() method has been called for the new cgroup).
   
   void pre_destroy(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cgrp);
   (cgroup_mutex held by caller)
   
   Called before checking the reference count on each subsystem. This may
   be useful for subsystems which have some extra references even if
   there are not tasks in the cgroup.
   
   int can_attach(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cgrp,
                  struct task_struct *task)
   (cgroup_mutex held by caller)
   
   Called prior to moving a task into a cgroup; if the subsystem
   returns an error, this will abort the attach operation.  If a NULL
   task is passed, then a successful result indicates that *any*
   unspecified task can be moved into the cgroup. Note that this isn't
   called on a fork. If this method returns 0 (success) then this should
   remain valid while the caller holds cgroup_mutex.
   
   void attach(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cgrp,
               struct cgroup *old_cgrp, struct task_struct *task)
   
   Called after the task has been attached to the cgroup, to allow any
   post-attachment activity that requires memory allocations or blocking.
   
   void fork(struct cgroup_subsy *ss, struct task_struct *task)
   
   Called when a task is forked into a cgroup.
   
   void exit(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct task_struct *task)
   
   Called during task exit.
   
   int populate(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cgrp)
   
   Called after creation of a cgroup to allow a subsystem to populate
   the cgroup directory with file entries.  The subsystem should make
   calls to cgroup_add_file() with objects of type cftype (see
   include/linux/cgroup.h for details).  Note that although this
   method can return an error code, the error code is currently not
   always handled well.
   
   void post_clone(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *cgrp)
   
   Called at the end of cgroup_clone() to do any paramater
   initialization which might be required before a task could attach.  For
   example in cpusets, no task may attach before 'cpus' and 'mems' are set
   up.
   
   void bind(struct cgroup_subsys *ss, struct cgroup *root)
   (cgroup_mutex held by caller)
   
   Called when a cgroup subsystem is rebound to a different hierarchy
   and root cgroup. Currently this will only involve movement between
   the default hierarchy (which never has sub-cgroups) and a hierarchy
   that is being created/destroyed (and hence has no sub-cgroups).
   
   4. Questions
   ============
   
   Q: what's up with this '/bin/echo' ?
   A: bash's builtin 'echo' command does not check calls to write() against
      errors. If you use it in the cgroup file system, you won't be
      able to tell whether a command succeeded or failed.
   
   Q: When I attach processes, only the first of the line gets really attached !
   A: We can only return one error code per call to write(). So you should also
      put only ONE pid.
   

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