Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] kvm,sched: Add gtime halted

Sean Christopherson
2025-02-27T14:39:45Z

On Thu, Feb 27, 2025, Fernand Sieber wrote:
> On Wed, 2025-02-26 at 13:00 -0800, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > On Wed, Feb 26, 2025, Fernand Sieber wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2025-02-25 at 18:17 -0800, Sean Christopherson wrote:
> > > > And if you're running vCPUs on tickless CPUs, and you're doing
> > > > HLT/MWAIT passthrough, *and* you want to schedule other tasks on those
> > > > CPUs, then IMO you're abusing all of those things and it's not KVM's
> > > > problem to solve, especially now that sched_ext is a thing.
> > >
> > > We are running vCPUs with ticks, the rest of your observations are
> > > correct.
> >
> > If there's a host tick, why do you need KVM's help to make scheduling
> > decisions? It sounds like what you want is a scheduler that is primarily
> > driven by MPERF (and APERF?), and sched_tick() => arch_scale_freq_tick()
> > already knows about MPERF.
>
> Having the measure around VM enter/exit makes it easy to attribute the
> unhalted cycles to a specific task (vCPU), which solves both our use
> cases of VM metrics and scheduling. That said we may be able to avoid
> it and achieve the same results.
>
> i.e
> * the VM metrics use case can be solved by using /proc/cpuinfo from
> userspace.
> * for the scheduling use case, the tick based sampling of MPERF means
> we could potentially introduce a correcting factor on PELT accounting
> of pinned vCPU tasks based on its value (similar to what I do in the
> last patch of the series).
>
> The combination of these would remove the requirement of adding any
> logic around VM entrer/exit to support our use cases.
>
> I'm happy to prototype that if we think it's going in the right
> direction?

That's mostly a question for the scheduler folks. That said, from a KVM perspective,
sampling MPERF around entry/exit for scheduling purposes is a non-starter.