LinuxConf Europe 2007

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Pavel Emelyanov - OpenVZ

Resource Management: Beancounters

This talk outlines various means of resource management available in the Linux kernel, such as per-process limits (setrlimit(2) interface). It shows how their shortcomings lead to the need for another resource control mechanism. Beancounters are proposed as one of possible implementations of this mechanism.

Beancounters are a set of per-process-group parameters that control the consumption of some particular resources provided by the kernel. This subsystem was proposed and implemented by Alan Cox and Andrey Savochkin and was further developed for OpenVZ mainly by Pavel Emelyanov. Beancounters can be used with containers but also have valid usage scenarios in non-virtualized kernels.

The talk gives an overview of the architecture, describes its goals and discusses its efficiency. It goes on to cover some implementation details in depth and the questions concerning the memory management. The physical memory consumption by processes, kernel memory control and network buffer accounting details are reported.

Finally, the performance issues and the future of beancounters as seen by OpenVZ developers are given.

Submitted paper

Paper (PDF) and Paper (tgz) .