Date:	Mon, 24 Aug 2015 16:00:49 -0400
From:	Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@...il.com>
To:	Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>
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

On 2015-08-24 13:04, Tejun Heo wrote:
> 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?
It depends, usually there isn't dynamic fluctuation unless there is a 
lot of hot[un]plugging of virtual devices going on (which can be the 
case for situations with tight host/guest integration), but the number 
of threads can vary widely between configurations (most of the VM's I 
run under QEMU have about 16 threads on average, but I've seen instances 
with more than 100 threads).  The most likely case to cause wide and 
dynamic fluctuations of threads would be systems set up to dynamically 
hot[un]plug vCPU's based on system load (such systems have other issues 
to contend with also, but they do exist).
>> 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.
In the cases I've dealt with this myself, nice levels didn't cut it, and 
I had to resort to SCHED_RR with particular care to avoid priority 
inversions.
>> 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.
It depends on the use case.  I never have more than 2 VM's running on my 
laptop (always under QEMU, setting up Xen is kind of pointless ona quad 
core system with only 8G of RAM), and I take extensive advantage of the 
cpu cgroup to partition resources among various services on the host.



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