RE: [Xen-devel] Does Xen detect busy-spinning VCPUs?

[Daniel Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Is your mini-OS pinned and you're sure dom0 or other
domains are not getting a piece of the pcpu?  If so...

I've seen anecdotal evidence of long pauses that led me
to wonder about interrupt latency here:

http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-devel/2008-08/msg00232.html

I don't recall the situation or the length of the pause
but perhaps you are seeing something similar.  Unfortunately,
I never pursued the answer to the interrupt latency question.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Robert Kaiser [mailto:kaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Friday, September 19, 2008 6:00 AM
> To: xen-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [Xen-devel] Does Xen detect busy-spinning VCPUs?
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm currently developing/testing a new scheduler for Xen and 
> I am seeing some 
> very strange behaviour which I can't seem to pinpoint: For 
> benchmarking 
> purposes, I am running a task inside Mini-OS in a tight, 
> busy-spinning loop 
> for some time. The loop repeatedly polls NOW() until it 
> exceeds a certain 
> time limit. What I am observing is that NOW() seems to "jump" 
> sometimes: two 
> subsequent reads return values which differ by tens of 
> milliseconds! I notice 
> that my scheduler gets invoked a couple of times, but it does 
> *not* switch to 
> another VCPU and I doubt that the scheduler invocations alone 
> take that long. 
> So  the loop should indeed be contiuously spinning with sporadic 
> interruptions in the range of a few microseconds, but not tens of 
> milliseconds. Yet, this is not what I am seeing. I wonder 
> where the (P)CPU 
> goes during those time intervals and so this possibly weird 
> idea came up that 
> Xen might use some trickery trying to detect and pause 
> busy-spinning VCPUs. 
> Is there anything like that in Xen (BTW: This is xen-3.2.1) , 
> and, if there 
> is, can it be disabled for a given domain?
> 
> (Sorry if this is a silly question. Since my code is 
> experimental and not well 
> tested yet, there is of course the possibility that I made 
> some stupid 
> mistake. However, I've been staring at code, debug logs, etc. 
> for several 
> days now without much success and I am slowly getting 
> desperate. If Xen 
> really does pause spinning VCPUs it would explain everything.)
> 
> Thanks for any help
> 
> Rob
> 
> -- 
> Robert Kaiser                    
> http://wwwvs.informatik.fh-wiesbaden.de
> Labor für Verteilte Systeme            
> kaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> FH Wiesbaden - University of Applied Sciences     tel: 
> (+49)611-9495-1294
> Kurt-Schumacher-Ring 18, 65197 Wiesbaden, Germany fax: 
> (+49)611-9495-1289
> 
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