Re: [RFC Patch v4 8/8] x86/hvm: bump the maximum number of vcpus to 512

[Chao Gao <chao.gao@intel.com>]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 09:10:33AM -0700, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 26.02.18 at 14:11, <chao.gao@intel.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 26, 2018 at 01:26:42AM -0700, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>>>> On 23.02.18 at 19:11, <roger.pau@citrix.com> wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 03:50:14PM +0800, Chao Gao wrote:
>>>>> Signed-off-by: Chao Gao <chao.gao@intel.com>
>>>>> ---
>>>>>  xen/include/public/hvm/hvm_info_table.h | 2 +-
>>>>>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>>>>> 
>>>>> diff --git a/xen/include/public/hvm/hvm_info_table.h 
>>>> b/xen/include/public/hvm/hvm_info_table.h
>>>>> index 08c252e..6833a4c 100644
>>>>> --- a/xen/include/public/hvm/hvm_info_table.h
>>>>> +++ b/xen/include/public/hvm/hvm_info_table.h
>>>>> @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
>>>>>  #define HVM_INFO_PADDR       ((HVM_INFO_PFN << 12) + HVM_INFO_OFFSET)
>>>>>  
>>>>>  /* Maximum we can support with current vLAPIC ID mapping. */
>>>>> -#define HVM_MAX_VCPUS        128
>>>>> +#define HVM_MAX_VCPUS        512
>>>> 
>>>> Wow, that looks like a pretty big jump. I certainly don't have access
>>>> to any box with this number of vCPUs, so that's going to be quite hard
>>>> to test. What the reasoning behind this bump? Is hardware with 512
>>>> ways expected soon-ish?
>>>> 
>>>> Also osstest is not even able to test the current limit, so I would
>>>> maybe bump this to 256, but as I expressed in other occasions I don't
>>>> feel comfortable with have a number of vCPUs that the current test
>>>> system doesn't have hardware to test with.
>>>
>>>I think implementation limit and supported limit need to be clearly
>>>distinguished here. Therefore I'd put the question the other way
>>>around: What's causing the limit to be 512, rather than 1024,
>>>4096, or even 4G-1 (x2APIC IDs are 32 bits wide, after all)?
>> 
>> TBH, I have no idea. When I choose a value, what comes up to my mind is
>> that the value should be 288, because Intel has Xeon-phi platform which
>> has 288 physical threads, and some customers wants to use this new platform
>> for HPC cloud. Furthermore, they requests to support a big VM in which
>> almost computing and device resources are assigned to the VM. They just
>> use virtulization technology to manage the machines. In this situation,
>> I choose 512 is because I feel much better if the limit is a power of 2.
>> 
>> You are asking that as these patches remove limitations imposed by some
>> components, which one is the next bottleneck and how many vcpus does it
>> limit.  Maybe it would be the use-case. No one is requesting to support
>> more than 288 at this moment. So what is the value you prefer? 288 or
>> 512? or you think I should find the next bottleneck in Xen's
>> implementation.
>
>Again - here we're talking about implementation limits, not
>bottlenecks. So in this context all I'm interested in is whether
>(and if so which) implementation limit remains. If an (almost)
>arbitrary number is fine, perhaps we'll want to have a Kconfig
>option.

Do you think that struct hvm_info_table would be a implementation
limits? To contain this struct in a single page, the HVM_MAX_VCPUS
should be smaller than a value, like (PAGE_SIZE * 8). Supposing
it is the only implementation limit, I don't think it is reasonable
to set HVM_MAX_VCPUS to that value, because we don't have hardwares to
perform tests, even Xeon-phi isn't capable. This value can be bumped
when some methods verify a guest can work with more vcpus. Now I
prefer 288 over 512 and some values else.

>
>I'm also curious - do Phis not come in multi-socket configs? It's
>my understanding that 288 is the count for a single socket.

Currently we don't have. But it's hard to say for future products.

Thanks
Chao

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