PID Limits

Ondat recommends that a PID cgroup limit of 32768 be used for Ondat pods.

💡 Most environments fulfill this prerequisite by default. Check the Ondat init container logs as shown below to ensure this is the case.

Ondat pods running in Kubernetes are part of a PID cgroup that may limit the maximum number of PIDs that all containers in the PID cgroup slice can spawn. As the Linux kernel assigns a PID to processes and Light Weight Processes (LWP) a low limit can be easily reached under certain circumstances. The PID limit can be set by the Kubernetes distribution or by the container runtime. Generally the limit is set to the machine wide default limit of 32768 but some environments can set this as low as 1024. A low PID limit may prevent Ondat from spawning the required threads.

The Ondat init container runs a script that checks for the PID limit of the PID cGroup slice that the Ondat pod runs in. If the script finds that the limit is less than 32768 it will log a warning. This warning can be viewed using kubectl to check the init container logs.

$ kubectl -n storageos logs -l app.kubernetes.io/component=control-plane,app=storageos -c init
WARNING: Effective max.pids limit (1024) less than RECOMMENDED_MAX_PIDS_LIMIT (32768)

Setting a Kubernetes PID limit

Kubernetes defaults to an unlimited PodPidsLimit, which results in the usage of the machine wide limit; typically 32768.

For information on how to configure the Kubernetes PID limit see the Kubernetes documentation here.

Setting a CRI-O PID limit

Certain orchestrators or setups use CRI-O as the container runtime. Openshift 4.x currently has CRI-O set a PID limit of 1024 by default. To configure the default CRI-O limit in Openshift 4.x see the RedHat documentation here. To configure CRI-O more generally see the CRI-O documentation here.