It turns out everything works if you set permissions appropriately of $CGROUP_ROOT/mesos/$TASKID/ so the yarn user can write to the hierarchy. Then all works exactly as expected.
I spent a while running through the container-executor code and when it mounts a cgroup subsystem it changes the ownership of the hierarchy to the yarn user, the original cgroups code of myriad attempted to do something similar by chmoding the directory but assumed the yarn user work be a member of group root, also when the code was written the chmod happened as root, currently that is ineffective as the standard framework user does not necessarily have permission to modify $CGROUP_ROOT/mesos/$TASKID. However, we have a mechanism for using a frameworksuperuser which can do this (my current hack). The current code also sets yarn.nodemanager.linux-container-executor.cgroups.mount-path=/sys/fs/cgroup and yarn.nodemanager.linux-container-executor.cgroups.mount=true, the documentation the requires edits to yarn-site.xml to get these passed through. Now that I've got things working, I'll start cleaning up the original code to provide an cleaner setup and adjust the documentation as necessary, I should have a PR soon.
