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-rw-r--r--Documentation/controllers/memory.txt38
1 files changed, 37 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt b/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt
index 05fe29ab1e5..09e1c737d28 100644
--- a/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt
+++ b/Documentation/controllers/memory.txt
@@ -289,8 +289,44 @@ will be charged as a new owner of it.
Because rmdir() moves all pages to parent, some out-of-use page caches can be
moved to the parent. If you want to avoid that, force_empty will be useful.
+6. Hierarchy support
-6. TODO
+The memory controller supports a deep hierarchy and hierarchical accounting.
+The hierarchy is created by creating the appropriate cgroups in the
+cgroup filesystem. Consider for example, the following cgroup filesystem
+hierarchy
+
+ root
+ / | \
+ / | \
+ a b c
+ | \
+ | \
+ d e
+
+In the diagram above, with hierarchical accounting enabled, all memory
+usage of e, is accounted to its ancestors up until the root (i.e, c and root),
+that has memory.use_hierarchy enabled. If one of the ancestors goes over its
+limit, the reclaim algorithm reclaims from the tasks in the ancestor and the
+children of the ancestor.
+
+6.1 Enabling hierarchical accounting and reclaim
+
+The memory controller by default disables the hierarchy feature. Support
+can be enabled by writing 1 to memory.use_hierarchy file of the root cgroup
+
+# echo 1 > memory.use_hierarchy
+
+The feature can be disabled by
+
+# echo 0 > memory.use_hierarchy
+
+NOTE1: Enabling/disabling will fail if the cgroup already has other
+cgroups created below it.
+
+NOTE2: This feature can be enabled/disabled per subtree.
+
+7. TODO
1. Add support for accounting huge pages (as a separate controller)
2. Make per-cgroup scanner reclaim not-shared pages first