user: delegate cpu controller, assign weights to user slices

So far we didn't enable the cpu controller because of overhead of the
accounting. If I'm reading things correctly, delegation was enabled for a while
for the units with user and pam context set, i.e. for user@.service too.
a931ad47a8623163a29d898224d8a8c1177ffdaf added the explicit Delegate=yes|no
switch, but it was initially set to 'yes'.
acc8059129b38d60c1b923670863137f8ec8f91a disabled delegation for user@.service
with the justication that CPU accounting is expensive, but half a year later
a88c5b8ac4df713d9831d0073a07fac82e884fb3 changed DefaultCPUAccounting=yes for
kernels >=4.15 with the justification that CPU accounting is inexpensive there.

In my (very noncomprehensive) testing, I don't see a measurable overhead if the
cpu controller is enabled for user slices. I tried some repeated compilations,
and there is was no statistical difference, but the noise level was fairly
high. Maybe better benchmarking would reveal a difference.

The goal of this change is very simple: currently all of the user session,
including services like the display server and pipewire are under user@.service.
This means that when e.g. a compilation job is started in the session's
app.slice, the processes in session.slice compete for CPU and can be starved.
In particular, audio starts to stutter, etc. With CPU controller enabled,
I can start start 'ninja -C build -j40' in a tab and this doesn't have any
noticable effect on audio.

I don't think the particular values matter too much: the CPU controller is
work-convserving, and presumably the session slice would never need more than
e.g. one 1 full CPU, i.e. half or a quarter of available CPU resources on even
the smallest of today's machines. app.slice and session.slice are assigned
equal weights, background.slice is assigned a smaller fraction. CPUWeight=100
is the default, but I wrote it explicitly to make it easier for users to see
how the split is done. So effectively this should result in session.slice
getting as much power as it needs.

If if turns out that this does have a noticable overhead, we could make it
opt-in. But I think that the benefit to usability is important enough to enable
it by default. W/o something like this the session is not really usable with
background tasks.

diff --git a/TODO b/TODO
index baed4b9255f795568090a76f4531499fc97ee4a5..58b6d5e48fc03682cb6cadcd1c37299f36f59c55 100644 (file)
--- a/TODO
+++ b/TODO
@@ -1233,6 +1233,8 @@ Features:
   - when reloading configuration, apply new cgroup configuration
   - when recursively showing the cgroup hierarchy, optionally also show
     the hierarchies of child processes
+- add settings for cgroup.max.descendants and cgroup.max.depth,
+  maybe use them for user@.service
 
 * transient units:
   - add field to transient units that indicate whether systemd or somebody else saves/restores its settings, for integration with libvirt

diff --git a/units/user/app.slice b/units/user/app.slice
index 0c73135e17945938424d4c7cd5adbb8578166d23..eac50645a4974b029197b44115413c7851f48772 100644 (file)
--- a/units/user/app.slice
+++ b/units/user/app.slice
@@ -10,3 +10,6 @@
 [Unit]
 Description=User Application Slice
 Documentation=man:systemd.special(7)
+
+[Slice]
+CPUWeight=100

diff --git a/units/user/background.slice b/units/user/background.slice
index 8f2a0949bda5d50a5110dc0a74127ddae0f9ee26..a9767753b3a4690370b5e82ada6f1b4f3fa04b30 100644 (file)
--- a/units/user/background.slice
+++ b/units/user/background.slice
@@ -10,3 +10,6 @@
 [Unit]
 Description=User Background Tasks Slice
 Documentation=man:systemd.special(7)
+
+[Slice]
+CPUWeight=30

diff --git a/units/user/session.slice b/units/user/session.slice
index 3d99d51bc5802da9e5cea2e5cc1c1d3d604d9d1f..aa12b7d03c433d2c7f1689ae82133316ada7b2de 100644 (file)
--- a/units/user/session.slice
+++ b/units/user/session.slice
@@ -10,3 +10,6 @@
 [Unit]
 Description=User Core Session Slice
 Documentation=man:systemd.special(7)
+
+[Slice]
+CPUWeight=100

diff --git a/units/user@.service.in b/units/user@.service.in
index 85fc3c907e238f5212b4b7d15d06b4bfe9d17ba1..eff0d5bcb6a04debc8fb478ca5162be871f0ca8e 100644 (file)
--- a/units/user@.service.in
+++ b/units/user@.service.in
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@ Type=notify
 ExecStart={{ROOTLIBEXECDIR}}/systemd --user
 Slice=user-%i.slice
 KillMode=mixed
-Delegate=pids memory
+Delegate=pids memory cpu
 TasksMax=infinity
 TimeoutStopSec=120s
 KeyringMode=inherit