Re: PV-vNUMA issue: topology is misinterpreted by the guest

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>]

. snip..
> So, it looks to me that:
>  1) any application using CPUID for either licensing or
>     placement/performance optimization will get (potentially) random 
>     results;

Right, that is a bug that Andrew outlined in this leveling document I
believe. We just pluck the cpuid results on whatever PCPU we were
running when the toolstack constructs it.

>  2) whatever set of values the kernel used, during guest boot, to build
>     up its internal scheduling data structures, has no guarantee of
>     being related to any value returned by CPUID, at a later point.

Or after a migration.
> 
> Hence, I think I'm seeing inconsistency between kernel and userspace
> (and between userspace and itself, over time) already... Am I
> overlooking something? 

No. I think that is bad. We should be providing the same data - unless
pinning is used or any other mechanism is employed to change the cpuid.

By default the cpuid ought to be same for a guest throughout its life
(lets ignore PV which is 'special').

Also oddly, what is with the SMT threads?

On my HVM guests, if I allocate four CPUs (vcpu=4), I get four cores and
each core says it has four SMT threads? This is based on /proc/cpuinfo:

[konrad@build-external linux]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "core id"
core id         : 0
core id         : 1
core id         : 2
core id         : 3
[konrad@build-external linux]$ cat /proc/cpuinfo |grep "siblings"
siblings        : 4
siblings        : 4
siblings        : 4
siblings        : 4

?
> 
> (I'll provide the same, for a PV guest, tomorrow.)
> 
> Regards,
> Dario
> 
> -- 
> <<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
> Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)