RE: [Xen-devel] Time skew on HP DL785 (and possibly other boxes)

["Tian, Kevin" <kevin.tian@xxxxxxxxx>]

>From: Dan Magenheimer [mailto:dan.magenheimer@xxxxxxxxxx] 
>Sent: 2009年4月6日 22:41
>
>> Well, my point is a bit out of topic here. Of course your
>> concern about cross-node TSC variance still makes sense
>> whether or not node affinity is enforced, as long as VM is
>> possibly migrated cross-nodes. My point is just that turn
>> on 'numa' itself is really not a 'extremely restrictive'
>> thing. :-)
>
>Hi Kevin --
>
>I think numa-mode is extremely restrictive because
>it makes a 32-way box work like eight 4-way blades.

virtualization in itself is something partitioned with each VM
representing one working set. Most VMs deployed so far
haven't requirement over virtual 4-way blades, and thus above
restriction is less relaxed. Then it's natural to span them
in-nodes instead of cross-nodes.

>
>I think the whole point of HT/QPI is to reduce the
>memory latency enough so that a NUMA box does not
>look like a NUMA box.  If time synchronization fails
>so that this type of box is forced to be partitioned,
>the value of HT/QPI is greatly diminished (at least
>in a virtualization environment).
>

It's orthogonal. The effort to keep reducing memory latency
on NUMA box doesn't mean no observable memory latency
difference for local and remote memory.

Thanks,
Kevin

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