Resource containers: a new facility for resource management in server systems

General-purpose operating systems provide inade-quate 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 fun-damental mismatch between the original design assump-tions 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 re-source principal coincide in the process abstraction. This coincidence prevents a process that manages large num-bers of network connections, for example, from properly allocating system resources among those connections. We propose and evaluate a new operating system ab-straction called a resource container, which separates the notion of a protection domain from that of a resource principal. Resource containers enable fine-grained re-source management in server systems and allow the de-velopment of robust servers, with simple and firm control over priority policies. 1