On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 04:46:27PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:

On Thu 13-02-20 08:23:17, Johannes Weiner wrote:

quoted

On Thu, Feb 13, 2020 at 08:40:49AM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:

quoted

On Wed 12-02-20 12:08:26, Johannes Weiner wrote:

quoted

On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 05:47:53PM +0100, Michal Hocko wrote:

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Unless I am missing something then I am afraid it doesn't. Say you have a
default systemd cgroup deployment (aka deeper cgroup hierarchy with
slices and scopes) and now you want to grant a reclaim protection on a
leaf cgroup (or even a whole slice that is not really important). All the
hierarchy up the tree has the protection set to 0 by default, right? You
simply cannot get that protection. You would need to configure the
protection up the hierarchy and that is really cumbersome.

Okay, I think I know what you mean. Let's say you have a tree like
this:

                          A
                         / \
                        B1  B2
                       / \   \
                      C1 C2   C3

and there is no actual delegation point - everything belongs to the
same user / trust domain. C1 sets memory.low to 10G, but its parents
set nothing. You're saying we should honor the 10G protection during
global and limit reclaims anywhere in the tree?

No, only in the C1 which sets the limit, because that is the woriking
set we want to protect.

quoted

Now let's consider there is a delegation point at B1: we set up and
trust B1, but not its children. What effect would the C1 protection
have then? Would we ignore it during global and A reclaim, but honor
it when there is B1 limit reclaim?

In the scheme with the inherited protection it would act as the gate
and require an explicit low limit setup defaulting to 0 if none is
specified.

quoted

Doing an explicit downward propagation from the root to C1 *could* be
tedious, but I can't think of a scenario where it's completely
impossible. Especially because we allow proportional distribution when
the limit is overcommitted and you don't have to be 100% accurate.

So let's see how that works in practice, say a multi workload setup
with a complex/deep cgroup hierachies (e.g. your above example). No
delegation point this time.

C1 asks for low=1G while using 500M, C3 low=100M using 80M.  B1 and
B2 are completely independent workloads and the same applies to C2 which
doesn't ask for any protection at all? C2 uses 100M. Now the admin has
to propagate protection upwards so B1 low=1G, B2 low=100M and A low=1G,
right? Let's say we have a global reclaim due to external pressure that
originates from outside of A hierarchy (it is not overcommited on the
protection).

Unless I miss something C2 would get a protection even though nobody
asked for it.

Good observation, but I think you spotted an unintentional side effect
of how I implemented the "floating protection" calculation rather than
a design problem.

My patch still allows explicit downward propagation. So if B1 sets up
1G, and C1 explicitly claims those 1G (low>=1G, usage>=1G), C2 does
NOT get any protection. There is no "floating" protection left in B1
that could get to C2.

Yeah, the saturated protection works reasonably AFAICS.

Hm, Tejun raises a good point though: even if you could direct memory
protection down to one targeted leaf, you can't do the same with IO or
CPU. Those follow non-conserving weight distribution, and whatever you
allocate to a certain level is available at that level - if one child
doesn't consume it, the other children can.

And we know that controlling memory without controlling IO doesn't
really work in practice. The sibling with less memory allowance will
just page more.

So the question becomes: is this even a legit usecase? If every other
resource is distributed on a level-by-level method already, does it
buy us anything to make memory work differently?