linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 3/3] sched: Implement interface for cgroup unified hierarchy

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Date:	Mon, 24 Aug 2015 13:04:27 -0400
From:	Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>
To:	Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@...il.com>
Cc:	Paul Turner <pjt@...gle.com>,
	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
	Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>, lizefan@...wei.com,
	cgroups <cgroups@...r.kernel.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	kernel-team <kernel-team@...com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 3/3] sched: Implement interface for cgroup unified
 hierarchy

Hello, Austin.

On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 11:47:02AM -0400, Austin S Hemmelgarn wrote:
> >Just to learn more, what sort of hypervisor support threads are we
> >talking about?  They would have to consume considerable amount of cpu
> >cycles for problems like this to be relevant and be dynamic in numbers
> >in a way which letting them competing against vcpus makes sense.  Do
> >IO helpers meet these criteria?
> >
> Depending on the configuration, yes they can.  VirtualBox has some rather
> CPU intensive threads that aren't vCPU threads (their emulated APIC thread
> immediately comes to mind), and so does QEMU depending on the emulated

And the number of those threads fluctuate widely and dynamically?

> hardware configuration (it gets more noticeable when the disk images are
> stored on a SAN and served through iSCSI, NBD, FCoE, or ATAoE, which is
> pretty typical usage for large virtualization deployments).  I've seen cases
> first hand where the vCPU's can make no reasonable progress because they are
> constantly getting crowded out by other threads.

That alone doesn't require hierarchical resource distribution tho.
Setting nice levels reasonably is likely to alleviate most of the
problem.

> The use of the term 'hypervisor support threads' for this is probably not
> the best way of describing the contention, as it's almost always a full
> system virtualization issue, and the contending threads are usually storage
> back-end access threads.
> 
> I would argue that there are better ways to deal properly with this (Isolate
> the non vCPU threads on separate physical CPU's from the hardware emulation
> threads), but such methods require large systems to be practical at any
> scale, and many people don't have the budget for such large systems, and
> this way of doing things is much more flexible for small scale use cases
> (for example, someone running one or two VM's on a laptop under QEMU or
> VirtualBox).

I don't know.  "Someone running one or two VM's on a laptop under
QEMU" doesn't really sound like the use case which absolutely requires
hierarchical cpu cycle distribution.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun
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