[Xen-devel] time accounting problem in pvops kernel

[Paolo Bonzini <pbonzini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

while experimenting a bit with time.c we found a bug in time
accounting.  Basically, /proc/stat counts idle time twice for PV guests
running a pvops kernel.

To reproduce, try this command in an unloaded guest:

grep cpu0 /proc/stat; sleep 20 ; grep cpu0 /proc/stat

and see the fourth number in /proc/stat (idle) increasing by approximately
4000 for a kernel with USER_HZ == 100. Instead, if you try these commands
instead (you need an otherwise unloaded machine for these):

grep cpu0 /proc/stat; timeout 20s yes > /dev/null ; grep cpu0 /proc/stat
grep cpu0 /proc/stat; timeout 20s dd if=/dev/urandom > /dev/null ; grep cpu0 
/proc/stat

the first and third number in the /cpu/stat increase instead by 2000 only.

The reason for this seems to be that in xen_timer_interrupt Linux's
normal timer accounting is called (via evt->event_handler) and this
calls account_idle_time. However, idle ticks are also added from
do_stolen_accounting, so that overall they're counted twice.

Related to this, it looks like stolen tick accounting is subtly
wrong. Even if only part of a tick is stolen by the hypervisor, Linux's
time accounting will add a whole tick to the user/system/idle time. In
a dynticks kernel (or maybe even if the scheduling quanta have some
kind of resonance with the guest's timer interrupt?) the sum of the
four components user+sys+idle+steal will then be larger than the wall
time. In fact, I found experimentally steal time to be usually 20%
off from wall-user-sys-idle when the machine is under moderate load
(e.g. 5 domains at 100% CPU usage, on a 4-CPU machine). Of course I used
the correct, divided-by-2 idle time to do this computation.

Paolo

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