[Mageia-dev] cgroup on the desktop

[Colin Guthrie]

'Twas brillig, and Robert Fox at 20/03/12 08:13 did gyre and gimble:
> Tried to research it, but it look more like it is for servers than
> desktop.  Could someone explain what the value-add is of using this on
> the desktop?

As used in the context of systemd just a general mechanism for tracking
processes. In the olden days, a service could exec other binaries quite
happily. Killing the primary pid of the service meant that any other
binaries launched were not necessarily killed. This mean that the
service needed to implement it's own accounting and tracking system and
there was no way to properly track to what service a given processes
belongs.

Now with cgroups, it's possible to fully track all the processes started
by a given service and kill each of them properly when stopping the service.

In addition it's also possible to identify to which service a given
process belongs. e.g. if something is spinning out of control you can
see it in top and then trace it back to the service itself.

There are numerous other things that can be done with cgroups such as
imposing various limits on a given service (and any subsequent processes
it spawns).


Overall this is an accounting mechanism that is something very much
baked into systemd. It's an integral part of it. It's not something we
could simply "turn off" on desktops vs. servers.


However, this isn't really the right place to discuss this topic.

Col




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Colin Guthrie
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