[libvirt] VM cpuTime from libvirt

Zvi Dubitzky DUBI at il.ibm.com
Mon Mar 23 17:56:57 UTC 2009


Hi Daniel

Sorry for bothering . I think I understand now how the cpuTime member of 
(domainInfo)  represents the load:

If  VM1 has 4 processors assigned out of total 8 of the Host machine and 
it is fully utilized , then after elapsed time of 'n' (real clock) seconds 
 the  delta cpuTime will be  4 *n seconds , so the utilization  of the 
Host cpu by VM1 is    (4 *n) / (n * 8) =  0.5  i.e  50%

Is that correct ?

It just happened that in my trivial  case of the VMs running no script of 
mine the  delta  cpuTime of VM1 (and of the similar VM2)  was the elapsed 
real time 'n'
so  the utilization was  n/ n*8 = 0.125   as I saw with virt-manager or 
virt-top. That was misleading 


Zvi Dubitzky 
Virtualization and System Architecture   Email:dubi at il.ibm.com
IBM Haifa Research Laboratory    Phone: +972-4-8296182
Haifa, 31905, ISRAEL 





"Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange at redhat.com> 
23/03/2009 16:12
Please respond to
"Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange at redhat.com>


To
Zvi Dubitzky/Haifa/IBM at IBMIL
cc
libvir-list at redhat.com
Subject
Re: [libvirt] VM cpuTime from libvirt






On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 02:28:00PM +0200, Zvi Dubitzky wrote:
> Currently the  cat  /proc/pid/stat    where pid is the pid of the VM 
Qemu 
> process gives the utime + stime of the  VM according to libvirt.
> 
> Unfortunately I notice  that this is actually the elapsed time of the 
host 
>  . I find this by using libvirt  , sampling  the cputime of each VM 
> process and compare it to the total elapsed time (of the Host Linux 
> machine) . Roughly  assuming full VM vcpu utlization,  the cpu 
utilization 
> of every VM is actually : ( # of VM  vcpus / total  # of Host cpus) 
.This 
> implies that there is  no  idle time per VM (while actually there is) . 
We 
> only know the idle time of the  Host via the  top command  at the Host .
> Is the cputime of a VM (from cat /proc/pid/stat of the Qemu process as 
> used by libvirt)  realy the cputime of the VM ?
> 
> I  tested with  a host having 2 sockets  X 4cpus =8  totally and 
assigned 
> 4 cpus to  VM1 and VM2 . libvirt gave equal cputime for each VM  which 
is 
> equal to the total machine elapsed time. But even if  VM1 has 4 vcpus 
and 
> VM2 have 8 vcpus the cputime of each VM 
> (from cat  /proc/pid/stat)  is the elapsed time.
> 
> The truth is that I am running the libvirt application on the host 
machine 
> and do the application wait there . Should that  matter much?
> 
> Each  guest idle time  is needed from the KVM for real cpu utilization 
> calc   to be independent from the guest OS .
> At least for Linux we can manually run 'top'  at  each guest  terminal 
> window , but I do not know if it will show the real idle time or the 
total 
> machine (host) idle time .At least linux has no idle process . Besides 
> this is not a good programmatic way  to get the VM idle time.
> 
> Is there a cure or I am missing something ?

I have a host machine with 8 cpus

I run 2 guests, one with 4 vcpus, and one with 1 vcpu.

Inside the first guest I run 4 copies of 

  while /bin/true ; do /bin/true ; done

This generates 100% cpu usage within the guest

If I run 'virt-top' on the host machine, I see that guest reported
as using 50% cpu. This is accurate because 4 cpus in guest, 100%
utilized is 1/2 of the total resources available to the host which
has 8 cpus.

Similarly if i run that load generator on the 2nd guest, which only
has 1 vcpu, then virt-top again correctly shows that guest as using
12.5% of total host CPU resources (100% / 8 == 12.5%)

So AFAICT, everything is working exactly as designed.

Daniel
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