RE: [Lse-tech] Re: CPUSET Proposal

Sylvain Jeaugey
2003-09-26T07:47:23Z

On Thu, 25 Sep 2003, Yu, Fenghua wrote:

> >> You could also do a big chunk of this by allowing normal
> >> privledge users
> >> to sched_setaffinity() a *subset* of their current allowed
> >> CPU set, but
> >> not expand it. sched_setaffinity() isn't *that* old of an
> >> interface, so
> >> I'm not sure why you can't just change the application at
> >> this point.
>
> >Because you need virtual cpu numbers. Suppose I have a 16-way
> >system, and *two* applications that know nothing about each other,
> >but each happens to want 5 cpus to run.
That's exactly the point in virtualizating CPUs.

>
> >With cpusets each application can ask the kernel for 5 cpus
> >(or a wrapper that invokes the application can do so), and then
> >the application can happily divide its work between virtual cpus
> >0, 1, 2, 3, 4 (using sched_setaffinity()). The kernel can be smart
> >and provide different physical cpus for each of the cpusets.
Actually, the intelligence is located in the wrapper application. The
kernel part of cpusets is given absolute masks. The virtualization is
located in the fact that calls to sched_setaffinity() are interpreted
within the cpuset, and that /proc/cpuinfo is also modified to reflect
available CPUs.

> In this case, the applications can get all of current affinity info by
> calling sched_getaffinity(). Thus, the applications can schedule the
> processes to different cpus without bothering kernel.
The problem is not only to run on a different CPU. We want that the used
CPU is decided by the admin and not the application. Otherwise you would
have no control on it. It could have been a solution for applications we
write like MPI (and that is the first thing we did).
But we wanted to create something that could be a little united for all
applications, without rewrite of applications. We add a lot of customized
apps, each having been hacked to do something like this, but this resulted
in a huge mess, lots of different configuration files, and no
interoperability. By pushing it in the kernel, everything is _simple_ and
_united_.

Sylvain