Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1757641Ab2EBBUl (ORCPT ); Tue, 1 May 2012 21:20:41 -0400 Received: from mail-qa0-f49.google.com ([209.85.216.49]:49770 "EHLO mail-qa0-f49.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756556Ab2EBBUj (ORCPT ); Tue, 1 May 2012 21:20:39 -0400 Message-ID: <4FA08BDB.1070009@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 01 May 2012 21:20:27 -0400 From: KOSAKI Motohiro User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120428 Thunderbird/12.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Anton Vorontsov CC: Rik van Riel , Pekka Enberg , Leonid Moiseichuk , John Stultz , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linaro-kernel@lists.linaro.org, patches@linaro.org, kernel-team@android.com, Glauber Costa , kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com, Suleiman Souhlal , kosaki.motohiro@gmail.com Subject: Re: [PATCH v4] vmevent: Implement greater-than attribute state and one-shot mode References: <20120418083208.GA24904@lizard> <20120418083523.GB31556@lizard> <20120418224629.GA22150@lizard> <20120419162923.GA26630@lizard> <20120501131806.GA22249@lizard> <4FA04FD5.6010900@redhat.com> <20120502002026.GA3334@lizard> In-Reply-To: <20120502002026.GA3334@lizard> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 3197 Lines: 75 (5/1/12 8:20 PM), Anton Vorontsov wrote: > Hello Rik, > > Thanks for looking into this! > > On Tue, May 01, 2012 at 05:04:21PM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote: >> On 05/01/2012 09:18 AM, Anton Vorontsov wrote: >>> This patch implements a new event type, it will trigger whenever a >>> value becomes greater than user-specified threshold, it complements >>> the 'less-then' trigger type. >>> >>> Also, let's implement the one-shot mode for the events, when set, >>> userspace will only receive one notification per crossing the >>> boundaries. >>> >>> Now when both LT and GT are set on the same level, the event type >>> works as a cross event type: it triggers whenever a value crosses >>> the threshold from a lesser values side to a greater values side, >>> and vice versa. >>> >>> We use the event types in an userspace low-memory killer: we get a >>> notification when memory becomes low, so we start freeing memory by >>> killing unneeded processes, and we get notification when memory hits >>> the threshold from another side, so we know that we freed enough of >>> memory. >> >> How are these vmevents supposed to work with cgroups? > > Currently these are independent subsystems, if you have memcg enabled, > you can do almost anything* with the memory, as memg has all the needed > hooks in the mm/ subsystem (it is more like "memory management tracer" > nowadays :-). > > But cgroups have its cost, both performance penalty and memory wastage. > For example, in the best case, memcg constantly consumes 0.5% of RAM to > track memory usage, this is 5 MB on a 1 GB "embedded" machine. To some > people it feels just wrong to waste that memory for mere notifications. > > Of course, this alone can be considered as a lame argument for making > another subsystem (instead of "fixing" the current one). But see below, > vmevent is just a convenient ABI. > >> What do we do when a cgroup nears its limit, and there >> is no more swap space available? >> >> What do we do when a cgroup nears its limit, and there >> is swap space available? > > As of now, this is all orthogonal to vmevent. Vmevent doesn't know > about cgroups. If kernel has the memcg enabled, one should probably* > go with it (or better, with its ABI). At least for now. > >> It would be nice to be able to share the same code for >> embedded, desktop and server workloads... > > It would be great indeed, but so far I don't see much that > vmevent could share. Plus, sharing the code at this point is not > that interesting; it's mere 500 lines of code (comparing to > more than 10K lines for cgroups, and it's not including memcg_ > hooks and logic that is spread all over mm/). > > Today vmevent code is mostly an ABI implementation, there is > very little memory management logic (in contrast to the memcg). But, if it doesn't work desktop/server area, it shouldn't be merged. We have to consider the best design before kernel inclusion. They cann't be separeted to discuss. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/