[Xen-devel] domU config file options for scheduling

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

This is addressed mainly to George, but maybe someone else want to work
on it too.

I found very inconvenient to have to do:

xm sched-credit -d xen08 -c 50

after a VM starts, and I think there should be some configuration values
to be added into the startup file. Something like:

shedcreditweight = 20
shedcreditcap = 50

would be really useful and save a load of scripting work for everyone
(avoiding shell scripts to run after a VM is started).

George, would you have time to implement this? Any chance to have this
added for the 4.0 release? That'd be really a GREAT addition, with I
believe, minimum effort.

Also, I had a chat with George about having a kind of "burst" feature
added to the credit scheduler. My idea is that, by default, someone
would setup a credit-burst-time, and a credit-burst-cap, to any VM that
has a a credit-cap set. That could be set this way in the domU config file:

shedcreditweight = 20
shedcreditcap = 50
shedbursttime = 5000 <--- 5 seconds max burst CPU time
shedburstcap = 80 <--- 80% CPU max during the burst
shedrecovertime = 2000 <--- 2 second recovery time

Whenever a VM goes over its shedcreditcap, the burst-cap would be used
for a time no longer than the credit-burst-time. When this time is over,
then shedcreditcap would be used, until the VM uses less than
shedcreditcap for a time longer than shedrecovertime.

I do believe that this kind of scheduling would be REALLY useful for
avoiding that a VM abuses the CPU usage. For people doing Xen VM hosting
business, or cloud computing, that would be just great. The values that
I wrote above would be a typical use.

I had a look myself in the scheduler code, and it's quite not obvious
where to patch. I think I have understood the burncredit() system, but I
didn't get where the values are read for the cap and all. Did I
understood well that Xen uses 30ms cycles for the credit scheduler? If
that is the case, then I believe that computing what cap values to use
depending on the burst parameters for a given 30ms scheduling cycle
wouldn't be such a big overhead.

If nobody wants to implement this, can someone gives me some pointers in
the sched_credit.c and all the .h structures? If I do stupid trials and
errors in my implementation at first, because I'd be a beginner at
patching Xen, would you guys have enough time to explain, and excuse a
newbie? Would that kind of patch be accepted if proven to work?

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand

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