Re: [Xen-devel] cpu utilization monitoring

[Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

If you turn on trace buffers and use xentrace/xenbaked, I think you get a
trace event whenever a VCPU is scheduled. From this you can work out how
long a VCPU spent running on each physical CPU. This is a bit heavyweight
but okay for e.g., debugging the scheduler and making sure it isn't
ping-ponging things too quickly. I'm not sure why you'd care about the stats
across individual physical CPUs during normal execution?

 -- Keir

On 11/9/06 10:48 pm, "Karl Rister" <kmr@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Is there a more appropriate interface for collecting this information then?  I
> would like to be able to sample on an some interval (say 3 or 5 seconds) and
> be able to see the amount of time a vcpu spent running on the individual
> physical processors during that time.
> 
> On Monday 11 September 2006 2:56 pm, Keir Fraser wrote:
>> The hypercall reports the point-of-view of the timeline of that VCPU. The
>> fact that its timeline may involve running on various different physical
>> CPUs should not matter, except for cache-warming and other
>> context-switching costs. The runstate_info interface absolutely does not
>> state that the reported run time only includes time spent running on the
>> currently assigned physical CPU.
>> 
>>  -- Keir
>> 
>> On 11/9/06 8:44 pm, "Karl Rister" <kmr@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>> Currently in the vcpu_runstate_info structure we have fields that contain
>>> the time spent when the vcpu is in one of four states.  When trying to
>>> determine the physical utilization that a vcpu is requiring of the system
>>> from libxc we make a domctl operation call to the XEN_DOMCTL_getvcpuinfo
>>> command.  When processing this command we pull the value for the
>>> RUNSTATE_running field and attribute it to the processor that the vcpu is
>>> currently running on.
>>> 
>>> I believe that with the new credit scheduler these values are wrong as it
>>> is possible that the vcpu has time in RUNSTATE_running that was not
>>> actually spent on the currently running processor.  Is there a separate
>>> path through the libraries and into Xen that retrieves this information
>>> in a more correct manner?  Given that a vcpu can migrate among several
>>> physical processors in the time between samples it seems that a finer
>>> grained accounting mechanism is needed to correctly report physical
>>> utilization of the hardware resources.



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