GSoC 2021 · Part II - Tracking windows and monitoring files

Picking up where I left off…

In the last post, I mentioned that I will be working on Implementing active resource management in GNOME. In this post I'll be walking you through what I've done so far, things I have learned and what I'll be working on next.

What I've done so far

My first task was to track the active or currently open window in gnome-shell and allocate more CPU weight to it. After discussing with my mentors we decided that building an extension for this will be easier so I built an extension which on getting notified when the focus-window has changed calls a DBus method provided by systemd to set the unit's properties. Right now it sets the CPUWeight of the focussed window to 1000 while the rest of the applications remain at 100(default)

You can check out the code here: Window Tracker Extension Repo

The next task was to set an extended attribute on a cgroup directory and monitoring any changes to it. This attribute would basically be a timestamp of when the window was last active or -1 if it's currently active. I started off in a dummy repository to figure out how to set extended attributes and monitor using inotify. Lucky for me GLib made the job a lot easier for reading and setting these attributes, all of the code for this went into the extension. As for the monitoring using inotify part we've decided to include that in uresourced for now. Right now it monitors the app.slice cgroup directory for creation or deletion of attributes/files.

New code in uresourced: r-app-monitor.c and r-app-info.c

What did I learn?

Admittedly, I spent more time reading documentation than writing code. I learnt more about cgroups and how systemd makes it easier to set/modify resources for a particular unit. Also how setting attributes on files or directories works and about how we can monitor them using inotify. While building all of this I stumbled upon a lot of the prior work done especially in uresourced and KCGroups. They served as a good reference whenever I was stuck on something or wanted to know how a particular function call worked.

The mentors also helped me a lot in not getting stuck, they helped me quickly unblock any trivial problems which I otherwise would have spent days getting stuck on. 😂

What's next?

For the next part, I'll be working on integrating all of this in uresourced, completing the cgroup directory monitoring part and then moving on to how we can gather more information to make better resource allocation decisions.