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

[Juergen Gross <jgross@suse.com>]

On 07/28/2015 01:19 AM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
> On 27/07/2015 18:42, Dario Faggioli wrote:
>> On Mon, 2015-07-27 at 17:33 +0100, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>>> On 27/07/15 17:31, David Vrabel wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, indeed.
>>>>> That's the downside of Juergen's "Linux scheduler
>>>>> approach". But the issue is there, even without taking vNUMA into
>>>>> account, and I  think something like that would really help (only for
>>>>> Dom0, and Linux guests, of course).
>>>> I disagree.  Whether we're using vNUMA or not, Xen should still ensure
>>>> that the guest kernel and userspace see a consistent and correct
>>>> topology using the native mechanisms.
>>>
>>> +1
>>>
>> +1 from me as well. In fact, a mechanism for making exactly such thing
>> happen, was what I was after when starting the thread.
>>
>> Then it came up that CPUID needs to be used for at least two different
>> and potentially conflicting purposes, that we want to support both and
>> that, whether and for whatever reason it's used, Linux configures its
>> scheduler after it, potentially resulting in rather pathological setups.
>>
> I don't see what the problem is here.  Fundamentally, "NUMA optimise" vs
> "comply with licence" is a user/admin decision at boot time, and we need
> not cater to both halves at the same time.
>
> Supporting either, as chosen by the admin, is worthwhile.

Wrong assumption again. *It's not only about NUMA*!

The choice is: "comply with license" against "sane scheduling". NUMA
just makes it more obvious, that the data the guest's scheduling
decisions are based on is garbage as soon as you tell the guest there
are hyperthreads without pinning the vcpus.

Right now the sibling information is more or less random leading
eventually to some vcpus thinking they have no sibling at all. As soon
as you deliver sibling information based on vcpu number you might end
up with a deterministic bad scheduling behaviour.


Juergen