cgroups

cgroups
Original author(s) Paul Menage, Rohit Seth
Developer(s) kernel.org (Tejun Heo et al.) and freedesktop.org
Initial release 2007 (2007)
Written in C
Operating system Linux
Type System software
License GPL and LGPL
Website www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/cgroup-v1/ and www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/ControlGroupInterface/

cgroups (abbreviated from control groups) is a Linux kernel feature that limits, accounts for, and isolates the resource usage (CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, etc.) of a collection of processes.

Engineers at Google (primarily Paul Menage and Rohit Seth) started the work on this feature in 2006 under the name "process containers".[1] In late 2007, the nomenclature changed to "control groups" to avoid confusion caused by multiple meanings of the term "container" in the Linux kernel context, and the control groups functionality was merged into the Linux kernel mainline in kernel version 2.6.24, which was released in January 2008.[2] Since then, developers have added many new features and controllers, such as support for kernfs,[3] firewalling,[4] and unified hierarchy.[5]

Versions

There are two versions of cgroups.

Cgroups was originally written by Paul Menage et al. and mainlined into the Linux kernel in 2007. Afterwards this is called cgroups version 1.[6]

Then development and maintenance of cgroups was taken over by Tejun Heo. Tejun Heo redesigned and rewrote cgroups. This rewrite is now called version 2, the documentation of cgroups-v2 first appeared in Linux kernel 4.5 released on March 14, 2016.[7]

Unlike v1, cgroup v2 has only a single process hierarchy and discriminates between processes, not threads.

Features

One of the design goals of cgroups is to provide a unified interface to many different use cases, from controlling single processes (by using nice, for example) to whole operating system-level virtualization (as provided by OpenVZ, Linux-VServer or LXC, for example). Cgroups provides:

Use

As an example of indirect usage, systemd assumes exclusive access to the cgroups facility

A control group (abbreviated as cgroup) is a collection of processes that are bound by the same criteria and associated with a set of parameters or limits. These groups can be hierarchical, meaning that each group inherits limits from its parent group. The kernel provides access to multiple controllers (also called subsystems) through the cgroup interface;[2] for example, the "memory" controller limits memory use, "cpuacct" accounts CPU usage, etc.

Control groups can be used in multiple ways:

The Linux kernel documentation contains full technical details of the setup and use of control groups.[15]

Redesign

Redesign of cgroups started in 2013,[16] with additional changes brought by versions 3.15 and 3.16 of the Linux kernel.[17][18][19]

Namespace isolation

Main article: Linux namespaces

While not technically part of the cgroups work, a related feature of the Linux kernel is namespace isolation, where groups of processes are separated such that they cannot "see" resources in other groups. For example, a PID namespace provides a separate enumeration of process identifiers within each namespace. Also available are mount, UTS, network and SysV IPC namespaces.

Namespaces are created with the "unshare" command or syscall, or as new flags in a "clone" syscall.[24]

The "ns" subsystem was added early in cgroups development to integrate namespaces and control groups. If the "ns" cgroup was mounted, each namespace would also create a new group in the cgroup hierarchy. This was an experiment that was later judged to be a poor fit for the cgroups API, and removed from the kernel.

Linux namespaces were inspired by the more general namespace functionality used heavily throughout Plan 9 from Bell Labs.[25]

Unified hierarchy

Whenever designing software, a software engineer seeks solutions which overall best address exigencies regarding stability, security, performance, as well as maintainability, programmability (API) and usability (ABI). By their nature, these exigencies balance each other, e.g., a mighty API to user space, that doesn't offer too much functionality, but carelessly exposes some key inner working, might seriously compromise stability and security. That is especially true if that software is part of the Linux kernel.

Tejun Heo decided to alter cgroups to prevent these scenarios, designing and implementing a unified hierarchy with only one user space entity that has exclusive access to the facilities offered by cgroups.

Kernfs was introduced into the Linux kernel with version 3.14, the main author being Tejun Heo.[26] One of the main motivators for a separate kernfs is the cgroups file system. Kernfs is basically created by splitting off some of the sysfs logic into an independent entity so that other kernel subsystems can more easily implement their own virtual file system with handling for device connect and disconnect, dynamic creation and removal as needed or unneeded, and other attributes. Redesign continued into version 3.15 of the Linux kernel.[27]

Kernel memory control groups (kmemcg)

Kernel memory control groups (kmemcg) were merged into version 3.8 of the Linux kernel mainline.[28][29][30] The kmemcg controller can limit the amount of memory that the kernel can utilize to manage its own internal processes.

Adoption

Various projects use cgroups as their basis, including CoreOS, Docker, Hadoop, Jelastic, Kubernetes,[31] lmctfy (Let Me Contain That For You), LXC (LinuX Containers), systemd, Mesos and Mesosphere,[31] HTCondor.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Jonathan Corbet (29 May 2007). "Process containers". LWN.net.
  2. 1 2 Jonathan Corbet (29 October 2007). "Notes from a container". LWN.net. Retrieved 2015-04-14. The original 'containers' name was considered to be too generic – this code is an important part of a container solution, but it's far from the whole thing. So containers have now been renamed 'control groups' (or 'cgroups') and merged for 2.6.24.
  3. ↑ "cgroup: convert to kernfs". 2014-01-28.
  4. ↑ "netfilter: x_tables: lightweight process control group matching". 23 April 2014. Archived from the original on 24 April 2014.
  5. ↑ "cgroup: prepare for the default unified hierarchy". 2014-03-13.
  6. ↑ "diff between Linux kernel 4.4 and 4.5". 2016-03-14.
  7. ↑ "Documentation/cgroup-v2.txt as appeared in Linux kernel 4.5". 2016-03-14.
  8. ↑ Jonathan Corbet (31 July 2007). "Controlling memory use in containers". LWN.
  9. ↑ Balbir Singh, Vaidynathan Srinivasan (July 2007). "Containers: Challenges with the memory resource controller and its performance" (PDF). Ottawa Linux Symposium.
  10. ↑ Jonathan Corbet (23 October 2007). "Kernel space: Fair user scheduling for Linux". Network World. Retrieved 2012-08-22.
  11. ↑ Kamkamezawa Hiroyu (19 November 2008). Cgroup and Memory Resource Controller (PDF presentation slides). Japan Linux Symposium.
  12. 1 2 Dave Hansen. Resource Management (PDF presentation slides). Linux Foundation.
  13. ↑ Matt Helsley (3 February 2009). "LXC: Linux container tools". IBM developerWorks.
  14. ↑ "Grid Engine cgroups Integration". Scalable Logic. 2012-05-22.
  15. ↑ "cgroups". kernel.org.
  16. ↑ "All About the Linux Kernel: Cgroup's Redesign". Linux.com. 2013-08-15. Retrieved 2014-05-19.
  17. ↑ "The unified control group hierarchy in 3.16". LWN.net. 2014-06-11.
  18. ↑ "Pull cgroup updates for 3.15 from Tejun Heo". kernel.org. 2014-04-03.
  19. ↑ "Pull cgroup updates for 3.16 from Tejun Heo". kernel.org. 2014-06-09.
  20. ↑ Pavel Emelyanov, Kir Kolyshkin (19 November 2007). "PID namespaces in the 2.6.24 kernel". LWN.net.
  21. ↑ Jonathan Corbet (30 January 2007). "Network namespaces". LWN.net.
  22. ↑ Serge E. Hallyn, Ram Pai (17 September 2007). "Applying mount namespaces". IBM developerWorks.
  23. ↑ Michael Kerrisk (27 February 2013). "Namespaces in operation, part 5: User namespaces". lwn.net Linux Info from the Source.
  24. ↑ Janak Desai (11 January 2006). "Linux kernel documentation on unshare".
  25. ↑ "The Use of Name Spaces in Plan 9". 1992.
  26. ↑ "kernfs, sysfs, driver-core: implement synchronous self-removal". LWN.net. 2014-02-03. Retrieved 2014-04-07.
  27. ↑ "Linux kernel source tree: kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git: cgroups: convert to kernfs". kernel.org. 2014-02-11. Retrieved 2014-05-23.
  28. ↑ "memcg: kmem controller infrastructure". kernel.org. 2012-12-18.
  29. ↑ "memcg: kmem accounting basic infrastructure". kernel.org. 2012-12-18.
  30. ↑ "memcg: add documentation about the kmem controller". kernel.org. 2012-12-18.
  31. 1 2 "Mesosphere to Bring Google's Kubernetes to Mesos". Mesosphere.io. 2014-07-10. Retrieved 2014-07-13.
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