Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 16:04:52 -0600
From: Marlys Kohnke kohnke@sgi.com
To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: [ANNOUNCE]: CSA job accounting for Linux 2.4.0
Comprehensive System Accounting (CSA) provides the ability to
track system resource utilization per job and charge back the cost
of those resources to users. Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
and SGI worked together to provide this job accounting feature on
Linux.
CSA job accounting is now available and can be downloaded from
the download link at http://oss.sgi.com/projects/csa.
There is a 2.4.0 kernel patch, a module tarball, command binary and
source rpms plus a command source tarball and documentation. This
has only been tested on i386 systems. An ia64 version will be
available soon.
CSA is a set of kernel changes, C programs and shell scripts
that provide methods for collecting per-task resource usage data,
monitoring disk usage, and charging fees to specific login
accounts. CSA takes this per-task accounting information and
combines it outside of the kernel by job identifier (jid) within
system boot uptime periods. Another project, Process Aggregates
(PAGG), is providing the kernel job infrastructure needed by CSA
(http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pagg).
Job accounting is important to production sites. As these sites
install large Linux systems, they need the enterprise style
accounting provided by CSA. Since numerous other Linux sites may
not be interested in job accounting, almost all of the kernel code
for CSA is contained in a loadable kernel module. Use of this
feature is configurable through the kernel configuration menu.
The new resource usage counters can also be used by performance
tools like sar and Performance Co-Pilot (PCP). These counters have
value outside of CSA and should be available regardless of whether
CSA is in use.
The CSA kernel patch is against a 2.4.0 kernel with the pagg
patch applied. The “kernel changes” link from http://oss.sgi.com/projects/csa
describes the kernel changes in detail. In summary, the CSA patch
contains the following changes:
1) added i/o counters (bytes read/written, blocks read/written,
number of read/write syscalls, and i/o wait time)
2) added configurable memory integral (memory use over time)
counters
3) added physical and virtual highwater memory counters
4) added CONFIG_CSA_JOB_ACCT kernel configuration menu item
5) added CSA wrapper procedures (real work done in loadable
module) for writing accounting records at start of job, end of
process, end of job, and CSA configuration changes; for processing
CSA configuration requests; and for processing CSA module
registration and unregistration
6) added acctctl syscall to check status, enable and disable job
accounting, set memory and cpu time thresholds (records only
written if threshold value is exceeded), provide a daemon
accounting record buffer to the kernel (i.e. from a workload
management program), and start/stop user job accounting
Thanks for any comments and suggestions regarding Linux job
accounting.
---- Marlys Kohnke Silicon Graphics Inc. kohnke@sgi.com 655F Lone Oak Drive (651)683-5324 Eagan, MN 55121