The paper outlines various means of resource management available in the Linux kernel, such as per-process limits (the setrlimit(2) interface), shows their shortcomings, and illustrates the need for another resource control mechanism: beancounters.

Beancounters are a set of per-process group parameters (proposed and implemented by Alan Cox and Andrey Savochkin and further developed for OpenVZ) which can be used with or without containers.

Beancounters history, architecture, goals, efficiency, and some in-depth implementation details are given.

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