How to enable memory cgroup on DietPi

Enable memory cgroup on a Raspberry Pi with DietPi an extremely lightweight Debian operating system.

As described inside issue cpuset disabled #1950 the memory cgroup is disabled due to memory overhead, so you need to be aware of this drawback.

In case of LXD (system container and virtual machine manager) the benefits of memory resource controller are far greater than the slightly increased memory usage.

$ sudo -i lxc info flying-lab

Name: flying-lab
Status: RUNNING
Type: container
Architecture: armv7l
PID: 1383
Created: 2021/11/13 12:05 CET
Last Used: 2021/11/13 15:02 CET

Resources:
  Processes: 9
  CPU usage:
    CPU usage (in seconds): 5
  Network usage:
    eth0:
      Type: broadcast
      State: UP
      Host interface: vethe15caef1
      MAC address: 00:16:3e:42:3c:f7
      MTU: 1500
      Bytes received: 80.34kB
      Bytes sent: 2.73kB
      Packets received: 403
      Packets sent: 24
      IP addresses:
        inet:  10.114.53.238/28 (global)
        inet6: fe80::216:3eff:fe42:3cf7/64 (link)
    lo:
      Type: loopback
      State: UP
      MTU: 65536
      Bytes received: 0B
      Bytes sent: 0B
      Packets received: 0
      Packets sent: 0
      IP addresses:
        inet:  127.0.0.1/8 (local)
        inet6: ::1/128 (local)

Inspect kernel boot parameters.

$ cat /boot/cmdline.txt

root=PARTUUID=8b0ac6f5-02 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait fsck.repair=yes net.ifnames=0 logo.nologo quiet console=tty1

Append cgroup_enable=memory parameter to enable memory accounting.

$ sudo sed -i -e "1 s/$/ cgroup_enable=memory/" /boot/cmdline.txt

$ cat /boot/cmdline.txt

root=PARTUUID=8b0ac6f5-02 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait fsck.repair=yes net.ifnames=0 logo.nologo quiet console=tty1 cgroup_enable=memory

Reboot operating system.

$ sudo reboot

Verify that memory accounting is enabled.

$ sudo -i lxc info flying-lab

Name: flying-lab
Status: RUNNING
Type: container
Architecture: armv7l
PID: 1438
Created: 2021/11/13 12:05 CET
Last Used: 2021/11/13 15:58 CET

Resources:
  Processes: 9
  CPU usage:
    CPU usage (in seconds): 6
  Memory usage:
    Memory (current): 29.45MiB
  Network usage:
    lo:
      Type: loopback
      State: UP
      MTU: 65536
      Bytes received: 0B
      Bytes sent: 0B
      Packets received: 0
      Packets sent: 0
      IP addresses:
        inet:  127.0.0.1/8 (local)
        inet6: ::1/128 (local)
    eth0:
      Type: broadcast
      State: UP
      Host interface: vethf125c08a
      MAC address: 00:16:3e:42:3c:f7
      MTU: 1500
      Bytes received: 26.05kB
      Bytes sent: 1.60kB
      Packets received: 186
      Packets sent: 14
      IP addresses:
        inet:  10.114.53.238/28 (global)
        inet6: fe80::216:3eff:fe42:3cf7/64 (link)

Additional notes

You can inspect dmesg output to determine current status of the memory control group subsystem.

Memory control group subsystem enabled at boot.

[    0.000000] cgroup: Enabling memory control group subsystem

Memory control group subsystem disabled at boot.

[    0.000936] cgroup: Disabling memory control group subsystem

Additional notes#

Additional notes