Disable Transparent Huge Pages from Kubernetes - docker

Question

I deploy Redis container via Kubernetes and get the following warning:
WARNING you have Transparent Huge Pages (THP) support enabled in your kernel. This will create latency and memory usage issues with Redis. To fix this issue run the command 'echo never > /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled' as root, and add it to your /etc/rc.local in order to retain the setting after a reboot. Redis must be restarted after THP is disabled
Is it possible to disable THP via Kubernetes? Perhaps via init-containers?

Answer 1

Yes, with init-containers it's quite straightforward:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
name: thp-test
spec:
restartPolicy: Never
terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 1
volumes:
- name: host-sys
hostPath:
path: /sys
initContainers:
- name: disable-thp
image: busybox
volumeMounts:
- name: host-sys
mountPath: /host-sys
command: ["sh", "-c", "echo never >/host-sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled"]
containers:
- name: busybox
image: busybox
command: ["cat", "/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled"]
Demo (notice that this is a system wide setting):
$ ssh THATNODE cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
always [madvise] never
$ kubectl create -f thp-test.yaml
pod "thp-test" created
$ kubectl logs thp-test
always madvise [never]
$ kubectl delete pod thp-test
pod "thp-test" deleted
$ ssh THATNODE cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
always madvise [never]

Answer 2

Ay,
I don't know if what I did is a good idea but we needed to deactivate THP on all our K8S VMs for all our apps. So I used a DaemonSet instead of adding an init-container to all our stacks :
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
name: thp-disable
namespace: kube-system
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
name: thp-disable
template:
metadata:
labels:
name: thp-disable
spec:
restartPolicy: Always
terminationGracePeriodSeconds: 1
volumes:
- name: host-sys
hostPath:
path: /sys
initContainers:
- name: disable-thp
image: busybox
volumeMounts:
- name: host-sys
mountPath: /host-sys
command: ["sh", "-c", "echo never >/host-sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled"]
containers:
- name: busybox
image: busybox
command: ["watch", "-n", "600", "cat", "/sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled"]
I think it's a little dirty but it works.