Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 1/2] xen: credit2: avoid vCPUs to ever reach lower credits than idle

[Dario Faggioli <dfaggioli@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2020-03-12 at 14:45 +0000, George Dunlap wrote:
> > On Mar 12, 2020, at 1:44 PM, Dario Faggioli <dfaggioli@xxxxxxxx>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > This patch makes Credit2 more robust to events like this, whatever
> > the cause is, and should hence be backported (as far as possible).
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Dario Faggioli <dfaggioli@xxxxxxxx>
> > Reported-by: Glen <glenbarney@xxxxxxxxx>
> > Reported-by: Tomas Mozes <hydrapolic@xxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Nit: The reported-by’s should be before the SoB (i.e., tags roughly
> in time order).
> 
Ah, right! :-(

> I think this is a good change to make the algorithm more robust, so:
> 
> Acked-by: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@xxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> But it seems like allowing a guest to rack up -2^63 credits is still
> a bad thing, and it would be nice to have some other backstop / reset
> mechanism.  
>
I agree. FWIW, this is way it took me a while to get to the bottom of
this. I was assuming it was *entirely* a Credit2 specific issue (caused
by, e.g., something like I found and fixed with patch 2).

When I noticed that things were not exactly like that, I also realized
that we at least need to prevent --under any circumstance-- that idle
vCPUs are preferred over "regular" vCPUs, and even if I did consider
approaches like "compacting" the credits dynamic, I went straight for
the INT_MIN approach.

Considering how this thread is going, I guess we should actually push
this further, and limit the "credit swing".

Thanks and Regards
-- 
Dario Faggioli, Ph.D
http://about.me/dario.faggioli
Virtualization Software Engineer
SUSE Labs, SUSE https://www.suse.com/
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