2009 Linux Plumbers Conference Call For Topics

CGroups (Control Groups) is a new feature that is being enabled in several distributions, including but not limited to openSUSE, Ubuntu and Fedora. Resource management is being considered as a Fedora 11 Feature (see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ResourceMgt). A lot of work has been done in the kernel in the form of the common infrastructure and addition of controllers (memory, CPU, network). libcgroup is being developed to deal with the challenges in user space of controlling and managing control groups. We propose a conference topic for cgroups to discuss the future of control groups, the development of newer controllers like the IO controller and the impact of control groups on various subsystems and how to address the user space challenge of configuration, unification of diverse APIs presented by the various kernel resource controllers. CGroups will being to become an important aspect of system management tools, since they provide both measurement and control of kernel resources. At the conference we would like to explore the user level and kernel design aspects to help better integration of the new feature for common desktop users and large data center operators. The topic also provides an opportunity for libvirt and liblxc to present their user space implementation of cgroups and to discuss the potential to merge all the three approaches.