When I was writing about fair share scheduling with systemd the other day, I rambled in passing about how I wished Linux had fair share memory allocation. Considering what fair share memory allocation would involve set off a cascade of actual thought, and so today I have what is probably an obvious observation.

In general what we mean by 'fair share' scheduling or allocation is something where your share of a resource is not statically assigned but is instead dynamically determined based on how much other people also want. Rather than saying that you get, say, 25% of the network bandwidth, we say that you get 1/Nth of it where N is how many consumers want network bandwidth. Fair share scheduling is attractive both because it's 'fair' (no one gets to over-consume a resource), it doesn't require setting hard caps or allocations in advance, and it responds to usage on the fly.

But given this, fair share scheduling really needs to be about something dynamic, something that can easily be adjusted on the fly from moment to moment and where current decisions are in no way permanent. Put another way, fair share scheduling wants to be about dividing up flows; the flow of CPU time, the flow of disk bandwidth, the flow of network bandwidth, and so on. Flows are easy to adjust; you (the fair share allocator) just give the consumers more or less this time around. If more consumers show up, the part of the flow that everyone gets becomes smaller; if consumers go away, the remaining ones get a larger share of the flow. The dynamic nature of the resource (or of the use of the resource) means that you can always easily reconsider and change how much of it the consumers get.

If you don't have something that's dynamic like this, well, I don't think that fair share scheduling or allocation is going to be very practical. If adjusting current allocations is hard or ineffective (or even just slow), you can't respond very well to consumers coming and going and thus the 'fair share' of the resource changing.

The bad news here is pretty simple: memory is not very much of a flow. Nor is, say, disk space. With relatively little dynamic flow nature to allocations of these things, they don't strike me as things where fair share scheduling is going to be very successful.