Re: PV-vNUMA issue: topology is misinterpreted by the guest

[Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@citrix.com>]

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On Mon, 2015-07-27 at 14:01 +0200, Juergen Gross wrote:
> On 07/27/2015 01:11 PM, George Dunlap wrote:

> > Or alternately, if the user wants to give up on the "consolidation"
> > aspect of virtualization, they can pin vcpus to pcpus and then pass in
> > the actual host topology (hyperthreads and all).
> 
> There would be another solution, of course:
> 
> Support hyperthreads in the Xen scheduler via gang scheduling. While
> this is not a simple solution, it is a fair one. Hyperthreads on one
> core can influence each other rather much. With both threads always
> running vcpus of the same guest the penalty/advantage would stay in the
> same domain. The guest could make really sensible scheduling decisions
> and the licensing would still work as desired.
> 
This is interesting indeed, but I much rather see it as something
orthogonal, which may indeed bring benefits in some of the scenarios
described here, but should not be considered *the* solution.

Implementing, enabling and asking users to use something like this will
impact the system behavior and performance, in ways that may not be
desirable for all use cases.

So, while I do think that this may be something nice to have and offer,
trying to use it for solving the problem we're debating here would make
things even more complex to configure.

Also, this would take care of HT related issues, but what about cores
(as in 'should vcpus be cores of sockets or full sockets') and !HT boxes
(like AMD)?

Not to mention, as you say yourself, that it's not easy to implement.

> Just an idea, but maybe worth to explore further instead of tweaking
> more and more bits to make the virtual system somehow act sane.
> 
Sure, and it it's interesting indeed, for a bunch or reasons and
purposes (as Tim is also noting). Not so much --or at least not
necessarily-- for this one, IMO.

Regards,
Dario
-- 
<<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)

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