Re: [Xen-devel] Cpu pools discussion

[Zhigang Wang <zhigang.x.wang@xxxxxxxxxx>]

George Dunlap wrote:
> Keir (and community),
> 
> Any thoughts on Jeurgen Gross' patch on cpu pools?
> 
> As a reminder, the idea is to allow "pools" of cpus that would have
> separate schedulers.  Physical cpus and domains can be moved from one
> pool to another only by an explicit command.  The main purpose Fujitsu
> seems to have is to allow a simple machine "partitioning" that is more
> robust than using simple affinity masks.  Another potential advantage
> would be the ability to use different schedulers for different
> purposes.
> 
> For my part, it seems like they should be OK.  The main thing I don't
> like is the ugliness related to continue_hypercall_on_cpu(), described
> below.
> 
> Jeurgen, could you remind us what were the advantages of pools in the
> hypervisor, versus just having
> affinity masks (with maybe sugar in the toolstack)?
> 
> Re the ugly part of the patch, relating to continue_hypercall_on_cpu():
> 
> Domains are assigned to a pool, so
> if continue_hypercall_on_cpu() is called for a cpu not in the domain's
> pool, you can't just run it normally.  Jeurgen's solution (IIRC) was to
> pause all domains in the other pool, temporarily move the cpu in
> question to the calling domain's pool, finish the hypercall, then move
> the cpu in question back to the other pool.
> 
> Since there's a lot of antecedents in that, let's take an example:
> 
> Two pools; Pool A has cpus 0 and 1, pool B has cpus 2 and 3.
> 
> Domain 0 is running in pool A, domain 1 is running in pool B.
> 
> Domain 0 calls "continue_hypercall_on_cpu()" for cpu 2.
> 
> Cpu 2 is in pool B, so Jeurgen's patch:
>  * Pauses domain 1
>  * Moves cpu 2 to pool A
>  * Finishes the hypercall
>  * Moves cpu 2 back to pool B
>  * Unpauses domain 1
> 
> That seemed a bit ugly to me, but I'm not familiar enough with the use
> cases or the code to know if there's a cleaner solution.
> 
A usecase from me: I want a pool that passthrough pcpus to the mission critical 
domains. A scheduling algorithm
will map vcpus to pcpus one by one in this pool. That will implement a reliable 
hard partitioning.
although it will lose some benefit of virtualization.

And we still want a pool using the credit scheduler for common domains.

thanks,

zhigang

>  -George
> 
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