Re: [Xen-devel] Xen 3.4.1 NUMA support

[George Dunlap <George.Dunlap@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Nov 9, 2009 at 11:39 AM, Dulloor <dulloor@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> What's the current scope and status of your scheduler work ? Is it
> going to look similar to the Linux scheduler (with scheduling domains,
> et al). In that case, topology is already accounted for, to a large
> extent. It would be good to know so that I can work on something that
> doesn't overlap.

My plan was to do something similar to Linux, but with this
difference: Instead of having one runqueue per logical processor (as
both Xen and Linux currently do), and having "domains" all the way up
(as Linux currently does), I had planned on having one runqueue per L2
processor cache.  The main reason to avoid migration is to preserve a
warm cache; but since L1's are replaced so quickly, there should be
little impact to a VM migrating between different threads and cores
which share the same L2.

Above the L2s I was planning on having an idea similar to the Linux
"domains" (although obviously it would need a different name to avoid
confusion), and doing explicit load-balancing between them.  But as I
have not had a chance to test this kind of load balancing yet, the
plan may change somewhate before then.

Problems to solve wrt NUMA, as I understand it, are to balance the
performance cost of sharing a busy local CPU, vs the performance cost
of non-local memory accesses.  This would involve adding the NUMA
logic to the load balancing algorithm.  Which I guess would depend in
part on having a load balancing algorithm to begin with. :-)

Once I have the basic credit patches in working order, would you be
interested in working on the load-balancing between runqueues?  I can
then work on further testing of the credit algorithm.  My ultimate
goal would be to have a basic regression test that people could use to
measure how their changes to the scheduler affect a wide variety of
workloads.

 -George

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