GitLab

When systems are overcommitted and resources become contended, it's hard
to tell exactly the impact this has on workload productivity, or how close
the system is to lockups and OOM kills.  In particular, when machines work
multiple jobs concurrently, the impact of overcommit in terms of latency
and throughput on the individual job can be enormous.

In order to maximize hardware utilization without sacrificing individual
job health or risk complete machine lockups, this patch implements a way
to quantify resource pressure in the system.

A kernel built with CONFIG_PSI=y creates files in /proc/pressure/ that
expose the percentage of time the system is stalled on CPU, memory, or IO,
respectively.  Stall states are aggregate versions of the per-task delay
accounting delays:

       cpu: some tasks are runnable but not executing on a CPU
       memory: tasks are reclaiming, or waiting for swapin or thrashing cache
       io: tasks are waiting for io compl...