Re: [PATCH 0/4] Alter steal-time reporting in the guest

Marcelo Tosatti
2013-03-07T02:31:57Z

On Wed, Mar 06, 2013 at 10:27:13AM -0600, Michael Wolf wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 22:41 -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 05, 2013 at 02:22:08PM -0600, Michael Wolf wrote:
> > > Sorry for the delay in the response. I did not see the email
> > > right away.
> > >
> > > On Mon, 2013-02-18 at 22:11 -0300, Marcelo Tosatti wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 05:43:47PM +0100, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > > > > 2013/2/5 Michael Wolf <mjw@linux.vnet.ibm.com>:
> > > > > > In the case of where you have a system that is running in a
> > > > > > capped or overcommitted environment the user may see steal time
> > > > > > being reported in accounting tools such as top or vmstat. This can
> > > > > > cause confusion for the end user.
> > > > >
> > > > > Sorry, I'm no expert in this area. But I don't really understand what
> > > > > is confusing for the end user here.
> > > >
> > > > I suppose that what is wanted is to subtract stolen time due to 'known
> > > > reasons' from steal time reporting. 'Known reasons' being, for example,
> > > > hard caps. So a vcpu executing instructions with no halt, but limited to
> > > > 80% of available bandwidth, would not have 20% of stolen time reported.
> > >
> > > Yes exactly and the end user many times did not set up the guest and is
> > > not aware of the capping. The end user is only aware of the performance
> > > level that they were told they would get with the guest.
> > > > But yes, a description of the scenario that is being dealt with, with
> > > > details, is important.
> > >
> > > I will add more detail to the description next time I submit the
> > > patches. How about something like,"In a cloud environment the user of a
> > > kvm guest is not aware of the underlying hardware or how many other
> > > guests are running on it. The end user is only aware of a level of
> > > performance that they should see." or does that just muddy the picture
> > > more??
> >
> > So the feature aims for is to report stolen time relative to hard
> > capping. That is: stolen time should be counted as time stolen from
> > the guest _beyond_ hard capping. Yes?
> Yes, that is the goal.
> >
> > Probably don't need to report new data to the guest for that.
> Not sure I understand what you are saying here. Do you mean that I don't
> need to report the expected steal from the guest? If I don't do that
> then I'm not reporting all of the time and changing /proc/stat in a
> bigger way than adding another catagory. Also I thought I would need to
> provide the consigned time and the steal time for debugging purposes.
> Maybe I'm missing your point.....

OK so the usefulness of steal time comes from the ability to measure
CPU cycles that the guest is being deprived of, relative to some unit
(implicitly the CPU frequency presented to the VM). That way, it becomes
easier to properly allocate resources.

>From top man page:
st : time stolen from this vm by the hypervisor

Not only its a problem for the lender, it is also confusing for the user
(who has to subtract from the reported value himself), the hardcapping
from reported steal time.

The problem with the algorithm in the patchset is the following
(practical example):

- Hard capping set to 80% of available CPU.
- vcpu does not exceed its threshold, say workload with 40%
CPU utilization.
- Under this scenario it is possible for vcpu to be deprived
of cycles (because out of the 40% that workload uses, only 30% of
actual CPU time are being provided).
- The algorithm in this patchset will not report any stolen time
because it assumes 20% of stolen time reported via 'run_delay'
is fixed at all times (which is false), therefore any valid
stolen time below 20% will not be reported.

Makes sense?

Not sure what the concrete way to report stolen time relative to hard
capping is (probably easier inside the scheduler, where run_delay is
calculated).

Reporting the hard capping to the guest is a good idea (which saves the
user from having to measure it themselves), but better done separately
via new field.