Red Hat Developer Program

Manage IT resources with cgroups (demo)

Senior Software Maintenance Engineer Neil Horman from Red Hat demonstrates cgroups, a generic mechanism the kernel provides for grouping of processes and applying controls to those groups. The grouping is done via a virtual filesystem called 'cgroup.' Within this filesytem, each directory defines a new group. Tunables within a cgroup are provided by what the kernel calls 'controllers.' Each controller is able to expose one or more tunable or control. When mounting the cgroups filesystem, it is possible to mount the filesystem several times, with each mount point having a different set of (non-overlapping) controllers. The key idea is that this allows the administrator to construct differing group hierarchies for different sets of controllers/tunables, which offers new ways to control and manage cloud resources. See what else is new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/details/