RE: [Xen-devel] Reducing I/O introduced domain scheduling

["Dong, Eddie" <eddie.dong@xxxxxxxxx>]

Keir Fraser wrote:
> On 12/10/2010 02:12, "Dong, Eddie" <eddie.dong@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> Keir:
>> When running vConsolidation on top of Xen in  a 4-core platform, we
>> noticed the I/O introduced scheduling per CPU is ~3K Hz, which seems
>> to be too frequent and cause frequent involve of domain 0 / Qemu,
>> which may polute cache of the guest and thus increase CPI (cycle per
>> instruction). 
>> 
>> We are thinking if we can reduce the domin switch here, and think
>> the output of I/O can be buffered and return immediately. The
>> buffered I/O can be flushed out at next IN emulation (or any
>> Hypervisor emulated I/O) or timeout such as 10 or 100 us to
>> guarantee minimal response. 
>> 
>> Ideally it can cover both PIO & MMIO, but we can start from PIO.
>> 
>> How do you think of that?
> 
> First of all have you tested with PV drivers? Performance tests with
> no PV drivers are not that interesting.

We used PV driver as more as possible, however the C disk in Windows guest 
doesn't support PV yet. (A task in BIOS side or Win HAL side?)

> 
> Apart from that this sounds like a generalisation of the buffered-i/o
> mechanism we already have for svga emulation. I suppose it might be
> plausible.

It is generic, similar to SVGA, but the timeout in generic I/O may be much 
smaller than display stuff, if a guest is waiting for an interrupt after 
several OUT instruction.

> 
>  -- Keir
> 

Thx, Eddie
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