cgroups etc (WAS: Re: Enabling the memory controller for F11)

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 11:08:51PM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
> mån 2008-12-08 klockan 07:45 -0800 skrev John Reiser:
> 
> > > [Please] enable the memory controller for F11.
> > 
> > Please give a URL to a description of what it does,
> 
> Memory controllers rock:
> http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt
> 
> Lots of links there in the end.
> 
> On servers memory cgroups taken together with the existing CPU slicing
> cgroups and affinity cgroups enables the same stuff that Solaris "zones"
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_Containers) does, more or less,
> but actually better because it's more fine-grained and doesn't need you
> to configure an entire virtual machine.
> 
> Instead of limiting this one virtual machine, the cgroups features make
> it possible to limit this one group of processes, without any
> virtualization overhead. I guess you could combine it with User Mode
> Linux if you want real, constrained virtualization.
> 
> cgroups are really a core killer feature in Linux, just that the rest of
> the world doesn't quite know yet, nor do userspace know quite how to
> handle all the nice cgroups, but much is happening right now.

The libvirt LXC driver provides container based virtualization that
is using the memory, dev and cpu shares cgroup controllers. It is
intended to allow lightweight resource isolation of processes, and/or
a full OS container to be managed using the same APIs & tools as
used for full machine virtualization like Xen/KVM/UML.

Daniel
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