Re: [PATCH RFC 0/8] x86/hvm, libxl: HVM SMT topology support

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 22/02/16 21:02, Joao Martins wrote:
> Hey!
>
> This series are a follow-up on the thread about the performance
> of hard-pinned HVM guests. Here we propose allowing libxl to
> change how the CPU topology looks like for the HVM guest, which can 
> favor certain workloads as depicted by Elena on this thread [0]. 
> It shows around 22-23% gain on io bound workloads having the guest
> vCPUs hard pinned to the pCPUs with a matching core+thread.
>
> This series is divided as following:
> * Patch 1     : Sets initial apicid to be the vcpuid as opposed
>                 to vcpuid * 2 for each core;
> * Patch 2     : Whitespace cleanup
> * Patch 3     : Adds new leafs to describe Intel/AMD cache
>                 topology. Though it's only internal to libxl;
> * Patch 4     : Internal call to set per package CPUID values.
> * Patch 5 - 8 : Interfaces for xl and libxl for setting topology.
>
> I couldn't quite figure out which user interface was better so I
> included both our "smt" option and full description of the topology
> i.e. "sockets", "cores", "threads" option same as the "-smp"
> option on QEMU. Note that the latter could also be used on
> libvirt since topology is described in their XML configs.
>
> It's also an RFC as AMD support isn't implemented yet.
>
> Any comments are appreciated!

Hey.  Sorry I am late getting to this - I am currently swamped.  Some
general observations.

The cpuid policy code in Xen was never re-thought through after
multi-vcpu guests were introduced, which means they have no
understanding of per-package, per-core and per-thread values.

As part of my further cpuid work, I will need to fix this.  I was
planning to fix it by requiring full cpu topology information to be
passed as part of the domaincreate or max_vcpus hypercall  (not chosen
which yet).  This would include cores-per-package, threads-per-core etc,
and allow Xen to correctly fill in the per-core cpuid values in leaves
4, 0xB and 80000008.

In particular, I am concerned about giving the toolstack the ability to
blindly control the APIC IDs.  Their layout is very closely linked to
topology, and in particular to the HTT flag.

Overall, I want to avoid any possibility of generating APIC layouts
(including the emulated IOAPIC with HVM guests) which don't conform to
the appropriate AMD/Intel manuals.

~Andrew

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