Re: DomU vs Dom0 performance.

[Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>]

On Tue, Oct 01, 2013 at 12:55:18PM +0000, sushrut shirole wrote:
> Please find my response inline.
> 
> Thank you,
> Sushrut.
> 
> On 1 October 2013 10:05, Felipe Franciosi <felipe.franciosi@citrix.com>wrote:
> 
> >  1) Can you paste your entire config file here?****
> >
> > This is just for clarification on the HVM bit.****
> >
> > Your “disk” config suggests you are using the PV protocol for storage
> > (blkback).
> >
> > kernel = "hvmloader"
> builder='hvm'
> memory = 4096
> name = "ArchHVM"
> vcpus=8
> disk = [ 'phy:/dev/sda5,hda,w',
> 'file:/root/dev/iso/archlinux.iso,hdc:cdrom,r' ]
> device_model = 'qemu-dm'
> boot="c"
> sdl=0
> xen_platform_pci=1
> opengl=0
> vnc=0
> vncpasswd=''
> nographic=1
> stdvga=0
> serial='pty'
> 
> 
> > 2) Also, can you run “uname -a" in both dom0 and domU and paste it here as
> > well?****
> >
> >      Based on the syscall latencies you presented, it sounds like one
> > domain may be 32bit and the other 64bit.****
> >
> > **
> >
> kernel information on dom0 is :
> Linux localhost 3.5.0-IDD #5 SMP PREEMPT Fri Sep 6 23:31:56 UTC 2013 x86_64
> GNU/Linux
> 
> on domU is :
> Linux domu 3.5.0-IDD-12913 #2 SMP PREEMPT Sun Dec 9 17:54:30 EST 2012
> x86_64 GNU/Linux
> 
> 3) You are doing this:****
> >
> > ** **
> >
> > > <snip>
> > > for i in `ls test_file.*`
> > > do
> > >    sudo dd if=./$i of=/dev/zero
> > > done
> > > </snip>
> >
> > My bad. I have changed it to /dev/null.
> 
> ****
> >
> > I don’t know what you intended with this, but you can’t output to
> > /dev/zero (you can read from /dev/zero, but you can only output to
> > /dev/null).****
> >
> > If your “img” is 5G and your guest has 4G of RAM, you will not
> > consistently buffer the entire image.****
> >
> > **
> >
> Even though I am using a 5G of img, read operations executed are of size 1G
> only. Also lm_benchmark doesn't involve any read/writes to this ".img",
> still the results I am getting are better on domU when measured with lm
> micro benchmarks.
> 
> > **
> >
> > You are then doing buffered IO (note that some of your requests are
> > completing in 10us). That can only happen if you are reading from memory
> > and not from disk.
> >
> Even though a single request is completing in 10us, total time required to
> complete all requests (5000000) is 17 & 13 seconds for dom0 and domU
> respectively.
> 
> (I forgot to mention that I have a SSD installed on this machine)
> 
> > **
> >
> > If you want to consistently compare the performance between two domains,
> > you should always bypass the VM’s cache with O_DIRECT.****
> >
> > **
> >
> But looking at results of lat_syscall and bw_mem microbenchmarks, it shows
> that syscalls are executed faster in domU and memory bandwidth is more in
> domU.

Yes. That is expected with HVM guests. Their syscall overhead and also memory
bandwith will be faster than PV guests (which is what dom0 is).

That is why PVH is such an intersting future direction - it is PV with HVM
containers to lower the syscall overhead and memory page table operations.


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