Linux Memory Management and Containers - Tutorial

Explore the intricacies of Linux memory management and its relationship with containerization in this comprehensive tutorial. Delve into key concepts such as demand paging, page scanning, swapping, swappiness, OOM killing, NUMA configurations, memory leakage, and various memory categories including page cache, shared memory, and tmpfs. Learn how memory and swap limitations/reservations for containerized processes are implemented through the cgroups (v2) memory controller in Docker, Podman, and Kubernetes environments. Understand the significance of container startup parameters like --memory, --memory-reservation, --memory-swappiness, and --cpuset-mems for Podman and Docker, as well as pod.spec.containers.resources.limits.memory and pod.spec.containers.resources.requests.memory fields for Kubernetes Pods. Visualize the impact of different memory configurations using atop and other tools through practical demonstrations. Gain hands-on experience by participating in memory exercises designed to simulate various scenarios on your own Linux systems, with all necessary resources provided via a shared GitHub repository. Suitable for users of major Linux distributions, with easy installation options for required tools like atop.

Tutorial: Linux Memory Management and Containers - Gerlof Langeveld, AT Computing