Proposed F19 Feature: Resource Management Tools

[Jaroslav Reznik]

This Feature has been submitted *before* Feature Submission Deadline and it 
required input/changes from the owner or it was queued.

= Features/ResourceManagementTools =
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ResourceManagementTools

Feature owner(s): Daniel Berrange <berrange at fedoraproject.org>

This feature will provide a library and command line tools for OS resource 
management, utilizing on cgroups and integrating with systemd and libvirt. 

== Detailed description ==
The kernel cgroups capability provides a general purpose framework for 
resource management of processes. Both libvirt and systemd make use of cgroups 
and resource tunables to be set and the libcgroup project provides some 
command line tools for managing croups. Despite this, however, it is 
difficult/impossible for an admin to use these to do effective system 
partitioning. The guidelines on how applications should co-operate in use of 
the cgroups hiearchy are flawed, leading applications to setup a hiearchy that 
cannot be used to do system partitioning. Another part of the problem is that 
there is no single high level view for the admin across all the "objects" 
using cgroups - the cgroups tools themselves are too low level, focusing on 
controllers & processes, rather than concepts like "resource groups", 'system 
service', 'virtual machine', etc.

This feature will seek to address the manageability problems with cgroups to 
facilitate system partitioning / workload isolation. The guidelines on using 
the cgroup hiearchy will be updated to allow a more practical hiearchy to be 
created by applications like systemd/libvirt out of the box. A library and 
corresponding command line tool will be written to provide a high level view 
of objects needing resource management. This will allow an administrator to 
easily define resource groups with different performance characteristics and 
control placement of system services and virtual machines into those groups.

Follow on work will also look at how to extend the controls to user sessions, 
and ad-hoc commands which may be invoked by users, as well as other non-cgroup 
based resource tunables under sysfs / procfs. 
_______________________________________________
devel-announce mailing list
devel-announce at lists.fedoraproject.org
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel-announce