[libvirt] cpu affinity, isolcpus and cgroups

Daniel P. Berrange berrange at redhat.com
Thu Jul 2 16:27:21 UTC 2015


On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 04:42:47PM +0200, Henning Schild wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Jul 2015 15:18:46 +0100
> "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Jul 02, 2015 at 04:02:58PM +0200, Henning Schild wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > i am currently looking into realtime VMs using libvirt. My first
> > > starting point was reserving a couple of cores using isolcpus and
> > > later tuning the affinity to place my vcpus on the reserved pcpus.
> > > 
> > > My first observation was that libvirt ignores isolcpus. Affinity
> > > masks of new qemus will default to all cpus and will not be
> > > inherited from libvirtd. A comment in the code suggests that this
> > > is done on purpose.
> > 
> > Ignore realtime + isolcpus for a minute. It is not unreasonable for
> > the system admin to decide system services should be restricted to
> > run on a certain subset of CPUs. If we let VMs inherit the CPU
> > pinning on libvirtd, we'd be accidentally confining VMs to a subset
> > of CPUs too. With new cgroups layout, libvirtd lives in a separate
> > cgroups tree /system.slice, while VMs live in /machine.slice. So
> > for both these reasons, when starting VMs, we explicitly ignore
> > any affinity libvirtd has and set VMs mask to allow any CPU.
> 
> Sure, that was my first guess as well. Still i wanted to raise the
> topic again from the realtime POV.
> I am using a pretty recent libvirt from git but did not come across the
> system.slice yet. Might be a matter of configuration/invocation of
> libvirtd.

Oh, I should mention that I'm referring to OS that use systemd
for their init system here, not legacy sysvinit

FWIW our cgroups layout is described here

  http://libvirt.org/cgroups.html

> 
> > > After that i changed the code to use only the available cpus by
> > > default. But taskset was still showing all 'f's on my qemus. Then i
> > > traced my change down to sched_setaffinity assuming that some other
> > > mechanism might have reverted my hack, but it is still in place.
> > 
> > From the libvirt POV, we can't tell whether the admin set isolcpus
> > because they want to reserve those CPUs only for VMs, or because
> > they want to stop VMs using those CPUs by default. As such libvirt
> > does not try to interpret isolcpus at all, it leaves it upto a
> > higher level app to decide on this policy.
> 
> I know, you have to tell libvirt that the reservation is actually for
> libvirt. My idea was to introduce a config option in libvirt and maybe
> sanity check it by looking at whether the pcpus are actually reserved.
> Rik recently posted a patch to allow easy programmatic checking of
> isolcpus via sysfs.

In libvirt we try to have a general principle that libvirt will
provide the mechanism but not implement usage policy. So if we
follow a strict interpretation here, then applying CPU mask
based on isolcpus would be out of scope for libvirt, since we
expose a sufficiently flexible mechanism to implement any
desired policy at a higher level.

> > In the case of OpenStack, the /etc/nova/nova.conf allows a config
> > setting  'vcpu_pin_set' to say what set of CPUs VMs should be allowed
> > to run on, and nova will then update the libvirt XML when starting
> > each guest.
> 
> I see, would it not still make sense to have that setting centrally in
> libvirt? I am thinking about people not using nova but virsh or
> virt-manager.

virsh aims to be a completely plain passthrough where the user is
in total control of their setup. To a large extent that is true
of virt-manager too. So I'd tend to expect users of both those
apps would manually configured CPU affinity of their VMs as & when
they used isolcpus.

Where we'd put in policies around isolcpus would be in the apps
like OpenStack and RHEV/oVirt which define specific usage policies
for the system as a whole.

Regards,
Daniel
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