[Libvir] Re: Virtual CPU functions

[Jim Fehlig]

Philippe Berthault wrote:
> Daniel Veillard a écrit :
>> On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 05:06:59PM +0200, Philippe Berthault wrote:
>>     
[snip]
>>   I wonder how people are most likely to use those APIs. Building scenarios
>> like:
>>     - physical CPU is to be locked to serve only VCPU N in domain D
>>     - domain A and domain B should be served by disjoint physical CPUs sets
>>     - monitoring 
>>  are the most common uses I would guess but I may be wrong.
>> First would require:
>>     - virDomainPinVcpu I guess
>> Second would require:
>>     - virDomainGetCpus and a number of calls to limit to sets :-\
>> The last one is likely to require getting full maps, and since it is likely 
>> to be called frequently the cheapest the better
>>
>>   If people who expressed interest on the list about VCPU function could
>> express their principal use case it may help getting the APIs right.
>>
>>   
> About third point (monitoring): I think the virDomainGetVcpus API 
> isn't adequate for this purpose. It would be better to have an API (to 
> be defined) which give the state of all physical CPUs because it's the 
> hardware resources we need to monitor, not the virtual ones. The 
> virDomainGetVcpus API permits to obtain the relation 
> vcpu->physical_cpu(s) but for monitoring usage, it's not interesting. 
> It would be better to have an API which give the reverse relation : 
> physical_cpu->vpcu(s) independently of domains and give the physical 
> CPU usage. With the virDomainGetVcpus API, it's impossible to 
> determine if a physical cpu is underused or overused and it's this 
> information we need to know for monitoring and for load-balancing.

I agree and do not see a monitoring use case for these APIs, only 
setting/getting configuration.  Perhaps we need more host-side entry 
points, for monitoring host resources?

Regards,
Jim