'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 -- Colin Guthrie colin(at)mageia.org http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited http://www.tribalogic.net/ Open Source: Mageia Contributor http://www.mageia.org/ PulseAudio Hacker http://www.pulseaudio.org/ Trac Hacker http://trac.edgewall.org/
