[libvirt] [RFD] Add/Modify some API functions about Host Information

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 05:34:28PM +0900, Minoru Usui wrote:
> Hi, everyone
> 
> In an environment with multiple host machines, I want to select a suitable
> host automatically on which I run a VM depending on machine's load.
> 
> Libvirt has APIs to get host machine's information,
> but I think these APIs aren't enough for above purpose.
> So I suggest below changes. What do you think?
> 
>   * virNodeGetInfo()
>       This API can get "CPU frequency"(mhz member of virNodeInfo) from
>       "cpu MHz" of /proc/cpuinfo. 
>       This value isn't constant, because it may be decrease by
>       power saving feature.(cf. cpuspeed on RHEL)
> 
>       This value is very useful for getting *present* cpu frequency, but I
>       want to get Maximum CPU frequency, too.
>       I want to add max_mhz member in struct virNodeInfo from
>       /sys/device/system/cpu/cpuXX/cpufreq/cpuinfo_max_freq.

The 'cpu MHz' field should already be reporting the max frequency
because  the current scaled frequency is pretty much irrelevant
for making decisions against. If it isn't reporting the max freq
for some drivers, we should fix that.

NB, you canot simply add extra fields to the virNodeInfo
structure because that would break ABI compatibility.

>   * virNodeGetFreeMemory()
>     This API returns amount of free memory of the host machine's all
>     node, but this value doesn't include host's cache/buffer memory.
>     For above purpose, it would be more suitable to account cache/buffer 
>     as free memory, because most of cache/buffer memory are reclaimable.
>     But I think virNodeGetFreeMemory()'s ABI should not change easily.
>  
>     I want to add function virNodeGetCacheBufferMemory(). It returns 
>     amount of cache + buffer memory from /proc/meminfo.

If we wanted to add API for this kind of information, I think
we'd likely want to have a more flexible API which we can
easily extend. eg something that looks like virDomainGetMemoryParameters
but for the virConnectPtr instead of virDomainPtr.

>   * virSysinfoRead()
>     This API is completely internal.
>     But DMI type1 information(dmidecode -t1) is useful for above
>     purpose, because it's one of the information which suppose to
>     processing capacity about host machine.
>     
>     I want to export virSysinfoRead() to user.

I wouldn't want to export the API, because that would require
us to expose some complex structures in the public ABI. I
think we'd just want to expose the data in the host capabilities
XML, or have an API to query the XML of just the sysinfo on its
own.

Regards,
Daniel