Re: [PATCH 0/4] Virtual Machine Time Accounting

Peter Zijlstra
2009-08-04T16:26:54Z

On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 17:07 +0200, Martin Schwidefsky wrote:
> On Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:16:38 +0200
> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> wrote:
>
> > These patches never seem to have made it onto LKML?!
> >
> > On Mon, 2007-08-20 at 15:13 +0200, Laurent Vivier wrote:
> > > The aim of these four patches is to introduce Virtual Machine time accounting.
> > >
> > > _Ingo_, as these patches modify files of the scheduler, could you have a look to
> > > them, please ?
> > >
> > > [PATCH 1/4] as recent CPUs introduce a third running state, after "user" and
> > > "system", we need a new field, "guest", in cpustat to store the time used by
> > > the CPU to run virtual CPU. Modify /proc/stat to display this new field.
> > >
> > > [PATCH 2/4] like for cpustat, introduce the "gtime" (guest time of the task) and
> > > "cgtime" (guest time of the task children) fields for the
> > > tasks. Modify signal_struct and task_struct. Modify /proc/<pid>/stat to display
> > > these new fields.
> > >
> > > [PATCH 3/4] modify account_system_time() to add cputime to cpustat->guest if we
> > > are running a VCPU. We add this cputime to cpustat->user instead of
> > > cpustat->system because this part of KVM code is in fact user code although it
> > > is executed in the kernel. We duplicate VCPU time between guest and user to
> > > allow an unmodified "top(1)" to display correct value. A modified "top(1)" is
> > > able to display good cpu user time and cpu guest time by subtracting cpu guest
> > > time from cpu user time. Update "gtime" and "cgtime" in signal_struct and
> > > task_struct accordingly.
> > >
> > > [PATCH 4/4] Modify KVM to update guest time accounting.
> >
> > Isn't this exactly what CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING is about?
>
> Not really, CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNT is a mechanism to sort out the
> steal time in the >guest< and to increase the precision of the cpu
> accounting values in general. The patches from Laurent improve the
> code in the >host< that sorts out guest time vs. system time.

Ah, that wasn't clear, it keeps mentioning guest all over the place ;-)

So its going to split user time into user and guest. Does that really
make sense? For the host kernel it really is just another user process,
no?

> The patches do make sense to me.

No idea there as they never made it to my lkml folder.