[libvirt] [PATCH RFC]: Support numad

Bill Burns bburns at redhat.com
Wed Feb 29 11:29:55 UTC 2012


On 02/28/2012 11:34 PM, Osier Yang wrote:
> On 02/29/2012 12:40 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 11:33:03AM -0500, Dave Allan wrote:
>>> On Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 10:10:50PM +0800, Osier Yang wrote:
>>>> numad is an user-level daemon that monitors NUMA topology and
>>>> processes resource consumption to facilitate good NUMA resource
>>>> alignment of applications/virtual machines to improve performance
>>>> and minimize cost of remote memory latencies. It provides a
>>>> pre-placement advisory interface, so significant processes can
>>>> be pre-bound to nodes with sufficient available resources.
>>>>
>>>> More details: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/numad
>>>>
>>>> "numad -w ncpus:memory_amount" is the advisory interface numad
>>>> provides currently.
>>>>
>>>> This patch add the support by introducing new XML like:
>>>> <numatune>
>>>> <cpu required_cpus="4" required_memory="524288"/>
>>>> </numatune>
>>>
>>> Isn't the usual case going to be the vcpus and memory in the guest?
>>> IMO we should default to passing those numbers to numad if
>>> required_cpus and required_memory are not provided explicitly.
>>
>> Indeed, why you would want to specify anything different ? At
>> first glance my reaction was just skip the XML and call numad
>> internally automatically with the guest configured allocation
>>
>
> Here the "required_cpus" stands for the physical CPUs number,
> which will be used numad to choose the proper nodeset. So from
> sementics point of view, it's different with <vcpus>4</vcpus>,
> I can imagine two problems if we reuse the vCPUs number for
> numad's use:
>
> 1) Suppose there are 16 pCPUs, but the specified vCPUs number
> is "64". I'm not sure if numad will work properly in this case,
> but isn't it a bad use case? :-)
>
> 2) Suppose there are 128 pCPUs, but the specified vCPUs number
> is "2". numad will work definitely, but is that the result the
> user wants to see? no good to performace.
>
> The basic thought is we provide the interface, and how to configure
> the provided XML for good performace is on the end-user then. If
> we mixed-use the two different sementics, and do things secrectly
> in the codes, then I could imagine there will be performance problems.
>
> The "required_memory" could be omitted though, we can reuse
> "<memory>524288</memory>", but I'm not sure if it's good to
> always pass a "memory amount" to numad command line, it may be
> not good in some case. @Bill(s), correct me if I'm not right. :-)
>
> Perhaps we could have a bool attribute then, such as:
>
> <cpu required_cpus="4" required_memory="yes|no"/>
>

Please keep Bill Gray on this thread. He is the author of numad and
is the best person to answer the above questions.

  Bill

> Regards,
> Osier




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