From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Rik van Riel Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC] kvm: x86: add halt_poll module parameter Date: Thu, 05 Feb 2015 14:23:00 -0500 Message-ID: <54D3C314.3070903@redhat.com> References: <1423152325-5094-1-git-send-email-pbonzini@redhat.com> <54D3BC94.9010007@siemens.com> <54D3C296.7030207@redhat.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-15 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: rkrcmar@redhat.com, mtosatti@redhat.com To: Paolo Bonzini , Jan Kiszka , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, kvm@vger.kernel.org Return-path: In-Reply-To: <54D3C296.7030207@redhat.com> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: kvm.vger.kernel.org On 02/05/2015 02:20 PM, Paolo Bonzini wrote: > > > On 05/02/2015 19:55, Jan Kiszka wrote: >>> This patch introduces a new module parameter for the KVM module; when it >>> is present, KVM attempts a bit of polling on every HLT before scheduling >>> itself out via kvm_vcpu_block. >> >> Wouldn't it be better to tune this on a per-VM basis? Think of mixed >> workloads with some latency-sensitive and some standard VMs. > > Yes, but: > > 1) this turned out to be very cheap, so a per-host tunable is not too bad; > > 2) it also affects only very few workloads (for example network > workloads can already do polling in the guest) so it only affects few > people; > > 3) long term anyway we want it to auto tune, which is better than tuning > it per-VM. We may want to auto tune it per VM. However, if we make auto tuning work well, I do not think we want to expose a user visible tunable per VM, and commit to keeping that kind of interface around forever.