[Xen-devel] Re: CPU scheduling of domains and vcpus

["Mike D. Day" <ncmike@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 21/04/08 18:56 +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Nauman Rafique, le Mon 21 Apr 2008 13:52:21 -0400, a Ãcrit :
> > In fact, wasted cycles can probably be avoided by doing opportunisitic
> > gang scheduling (i.e. gang schedule, unless there would be wasted
> > cycles)
> 
> How do you detect that there would be wasted cycles?

The only way is for a very self-aware guest to use a paravirtual
feature to give a hint to the scheduler. 

Which is also the way to solve the original problem: the
paravirtualized guest can provide a hint to the scheduler that it is
holding a contended lock.

Alternatively, the scheduler can notify the guest that it is about to
be preempted by the hypervisor and now would be a good time to sleep
before gaining a contended spinlock.

In either case lock contention within a multi-vcpu guest is probably
not as bad a problem as the various solutions cause.

If a workload is suffering so much, give it multiple vcpus that are
mapped 1:1 to physical cpus. 

Mike

-- 
Mike D. Day
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