Resource Containers: A New Facility for Resource Management in Server Systems

General-purpose operating systems provide inadequate support for resource management in large-scale servers. Applications lack sufficient control over scheduling and management of machine resources, which makes it difficult to enforce priority policies, and to provide robust and controlled service. There is a fundamental mismatch between the original design assumptions underlying the resource management mechanisms of current general-purpose operating systems, and the behavior of modern server applications. In particular, the operating system's notions of protection domain and resource principal coincide in the process abstraction. This coincidence prevents a process that manages large numbers of network connections, for example, from properly allocating system resources among those connections.

We propose and evaluate a new operating system abstraction called a resource container, which separates the notion of a protection domain from that of a resource principal. Resource containers enable fine-grained resource management in server systems and allow the development of robust servers, with simple and firm control over priority policies.