System Administration Guide: Oracle Solaris Containers-Resource Management and Oracle Solaris Zones

Determining Available Resources

Resource pools encompass all of the system resources that are available for consumption by applications.

For a single executing Solaris instance, a resource of a single type, such as a CPU, must be allocated to a single partition. There can be one or more partitions for each type of resource. Each partition contains a unique set of resources.

For example, a machine with four CPUs and two processor sets can have the following setup:

pset 0: 0 1

pset 1: 2 3

where 0, 1, 2 and 3 after the colon represent CPU IDs. Note that the two processor sets account for all four CPUs.

The same machine cannot have the following setup:

pset 0: 0 1

pset 1: 1 2 3

It cannot have this setup because CPU 1 can appear in only one pset at a time.

Resources cannot be accessed from any partition other than the partition to which they belong.

To discover the available resources, poold interrogates the active pools configuration to find partitions. All resources within all partitions are summed to determine the total amount of available resources for each type of resource that is controlled.

This quantity of resources is the basic figure that poold uses in its operations. However, there are constraints upon this figure that limit the flexibility that poold has to make allocations. For information about available constraints, see Configuration Constraints.