From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from tuke.sk (sfinx.uvt.tuke.sk [147.232.1.98]) by ccsun.tuke.sk (8.9.3/8.9.3/Debian/GNU) with ESMTP id MAA22435 for ; Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:13:30 +0200 Message-ID: <39A4F548.B8EB5308@tuke.sk> Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2000 12:13:28 +0200 From: Jan Astalos MIME-Version: 1.0 Subject: Question: memory management and QoS Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org Return-Path: To: linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: Hello, I have a question about possibility to provide Quality of Service guaranties by Linux memory management. I'm asking this in the context of possible use of Linux clusters in computational grids (http://www.gridforum.org/). There is still more computing power (mostly unused) in workstations... One of the most important issues (IMO) is QoS. Especially, how OS can guarantee availability of resources. Since Linux is top-ranking OS in high-performance clusters, obviously there will be need to implement QoS in it. So, why am I writing this to this list ? In last couple of days I was experimenting with Linux MM subsystem to find out whether Linux can (how it could) assure exclusive access to some amount of memory for user. Of course I was searching the archives. So far, I found only the beancounter patch, which is designed for limiting of memory usage. This is not quite exactly what I am looking for. Rather, users should have their memory reserved... If I missed something please send me the pointers. I have some (rough) ideas how it could work and I would be happy if you'll send me your opinions. Concept of personal swapfiles: - each user would have its own swapfile (size would depend on his memory needs and disk quota, he would be able to resize it) - system swapfile would be shared between daemons and superuser - each active user would have some amount of physical pages allocated (according to selected policy) The benefits (among others): - there wouldn't be system OOM (only per user OOM) - user would be able to check his available memory - no limits for VM address space - there could be more policies for sharing of physical memory by users (and system) Drawbacks: Thanks in advance for your comments, Jan -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux.eu.org/Linux-MM/