Re: [Xen-devel] Core parking feature enable

["Liu, Jinsong" <jinsong.liu@xxxxxxxxx>]

Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 17.02.12 at 09:54, "Liu, Jinsong" <jinsong.liu@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Core parking is a power control feature and it can co-work with NPTM
>> to control system power budget through online/offline some CPUs in
>> the system. These patches implement core parking feature for xen.
>> They consist of 2 
>> parts: dom0 patches and xen hypervisor patches.
>> 
>> At dom0 side, patches include
>> [Patch 1/3] intercept native pad (Processor Aggregator Device) logic,
>> providing a native interface for natvie platform and a paravirt
>> template for paravirt platform, so that os can implicitly hook to
>> proper ops accordingly; [Patch 2/3] redirect paravirt template to
>> Xen pv ops; [Patch 3/3] implement Xen pad logic, and when getting
>> pad device 
>> notification, it hypercalls to Xen hypervisor for core parking. Due
>> to the characteristic of xen continue_hypercall_on_cpu, dom0
>> seperately send/get 
>> core parking request/result;
>> 
>> At Xen hypervisor side, patches include
>> [Patch 1/2] implement hypercall through which dom0 send core parking
>> request, and get core parking result;
>> [Patch 2/2] implement Xen core parking. Different core parking
>> sequence has different power/performance result, due to cpu
>> socket/core/thread topology. This patch provide power-first and
>> performance-first policies, users can choose core parking policy on
>> their own demand, considering power and performance tradeoff.
> 
> Does this really need to be implemented in the hypervisor? All this
> boils down to is a wrapper around cpu_down() and cpu_up(), which
> have hypercall interfaces already. So I'd rather see this as being
> an extension to Dom0's pCPU management patches (which aren't
> upstream afaict)...
> 
> Jan

It's a design choice. Core parking is not only a wrapper around cpu_down/up, it 
also involves policy algorithms which depend on physical cpu topology and 
cpu_online/present_map, etc. Implement core parking at dom0 side need expose 
all those information to dom0, with potential issues (like coherence), while 
dom0 still need do same work as hypervisor.
Our idea is to keep dom0 as ACPI parser, then hypercall and do rest things at 
hypervisor side.

Thanks,
Jinsong


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