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memcg: fix documentation
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The description about various statistics from memory.stat is not accurate
and confusing at times.

Correct this along with a few other minor cleanups.

Signed-off-by: Bharata B Rao <bharata@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Balbir Singh <balbir@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
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Bharata B Rao authored and Linus Torvalds committed Apr 13, 2009
1 parent e930438 commit c863d83
Showing 1 changed file with 32 additions and 23 deletions.
55 changes: 32 additions & 23 deletions Documentation/cgroups/memory.txt
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -6,15 +6,14 @@ used here with the memory controller that is used in hardware.

Salient features

a. Enable control of both RSS (mapped) and Page Cache (unmapped) pages
a. Enable control of Anonymous, Page Cache (mapped and unmapped) and
Swap Cache memory pages.
b. The infrastructure allows easy addition of other types of memory to control
c. Provides *zero overhead* for non memory controller users
d. Provides a double LRU: global memory pressure causes reclaim from the
global LRU; a cgroup on hitting a limit, reclaims from the per
cgroup LRU

NOTE: Swap Cache (unmapped) is not accounted now.

Benefits and Purpose of the memory controller

The memory controller isolates the memory behaviour of a group of tasks
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -290,34 +289,44 @@ will be charged as a new owner of it.
moved to the parent. If you want to avoid that, force_empty will be useful.

5.2 stat file
memory.stat file includes following statistics (now)
cache - # of pages from page-cache and shmem.
rss - # of pages from anonymous memory.
pgpgin - # of event of charging
pgpgout - # of event of uncharging
active_anon - # of pages on active lru of anon, shmem.
inactive_anon - # of pages on active lru of anon, shmem
active_file - # of pages on active lru of file-cache
inactive_file - # of pages on inactive lru of file cache
unevictable - # of pages cannot be reclaimed.(mlocked etc)

Below is depend on CONFIG_DEBUG_VM.
inactive_ratio - VM internal parameter. (see mm/page_alloc.c)
recent_rotated_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
recent_rotated_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
recent_scanned_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
recent_scanned_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)

Memo:

memory.stat file includes following statistics

cache - # of bytes of page cache memory.
rss - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory.
pgpgin - # of pages paged in (equivalent to # of charging events).
pgpgout - # of pages paged out (equivalent to # of uncharging events).
active_anon - # of bytes of anonymous and swap cache memory on active
lru list.
inactive_anon - # of bytes of anonymous memory and swap cache memory on
inactive lru list.
active_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on active lru list.
inactive_file - # of bytes of file-backed memory on inactive lru list.
unevictable - # of bytes of memory that cannot be reclaimed (mlocked etc).

The following additional stats are dependent on CONFIG_DEBUG_VM.

inactive_ratio - VM internal parameter. (see mm/page_alloc.c)
recent_rotated_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
recent_rotated_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
recent_scanned_anon - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)
recent_scanned_file - VM internal parameter. (see mm/vmscan.c)

Memo:
recent_rotated means recent frequency of lru rotation.
recent_scanned means recent # of scans to lru.
showing for better debug please see the code for meanings.

Note:
Only anonymous and swap cache memory is listed as part of 'rss' stat.
This should not be confused with the true 'resident set size' or the
amount of physical memory used by the cgroup. Per-cgroup rss
accounting is not done yet.

5.3 swappiness
Similar to /proc/sys/vm/swappiness, but affecting a hierarchy of groups only.

Following cgroup's swapiness can't be changed.
Following cgroups' swapiness can't be changed.
- root cgroup (uses /proc/sys/vm/swappiness).
- a cgroup which uses hierarchy and it has child cgroup.
- a cgroup which uses hierarchy and not the root of hierarchy.
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