Re: [PATCH v3 3/3] cgroup: implement cgroup.populated for the default hierarchy

[Li Zefan]

> cgroup users often need a way to determine when a cgroup's
> subhierarchy becomes empty so that it can be cleaned up.  cgroup
> currently provides release_agent for it; unfortunately, this mechanism
> is riddled with issues.
> 
> * It delivers events by forking and execing a userland binary
>   specified as the release_agent.  This is a long deprecated method of
>   notification delivery.  It's extremely heavy, slow and cumbersome to
>   integrate with larger infrastructure.
> 
> * There is single monitoring point at the root.  There's no way to
>   delegate management of a subtree.
> 
> * The event isn't recursive.  It triggers when a cgroup doesn't have
>   any tasks or child cgroups.  Events for internal nodes trigger only
>   after all children are removed.  This again makes it impossible to
>   delegate management of a subtree.
> 
> * Events are filtered from the kernel side.  "notify_on_release" file
>   is used to subscribe to or suppress release event.  This is
>   unnecessarily complicated and probably done this way because event
>   delivery itself was expensive.
> 
> This patch implements interface file "cgroup.populated" which can be
> used to monitor whether the cgroup's subhierarchy has tasks in it or
> not.  Its value is 0 if there is no task in the cgroup and its
> descendants; otherwise, 1, and kernfs_notify() notificaiton is
> triggers when the value changes, which can be monitored through poll
> and [di]notify.
> 
> This is a lot ligther and simpler and trivially allows delegating
> management of subhierarchy - subhierarchy monitoring can block further
> propgation simply by putting itself or another process in the root of
> the subhierarchy and monitor events that it's interested in from there
> without interfering with monitoring higher in the tree.
> 
> v2: Patch description updated as per Serge.
> 
> v3: "cgroup.subtree_populated" renamed to "cgroup.populated".  The
>     subtree_ prefix was a bit confusing because
>     "cgroup.subtree_control" uses it to denote the tree rooted at the
>     cgroup sans the cgroup itself while the populated state includes
>     the cgroup itself.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Cc: Lennart Poettering <lennart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Acked-by: Li Zefan <lizefan@xxxxxxxxxx>

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