On Mon, 2015-08-24 at 13:04 -0400, Tejun Heo wrote:
> Hello, Austin.
>
> On Mon, Aug 24, 2015 at 11:47:02AM -0400, Austin S Hemmelgarn wrote:
> > >Just to learn more, what sort of hypervisor support threads are we
> > >talking about? They would have to consume considerable amount of cpu
> > >cycles for problems like this to be relevant and be dynamic in numbers
> > >in a way which letting them competing against vcpus makes sense. Do
> > >IO helpers meet these criteria?
> > >
> > Depending on the configuration, yes they can. VirtualBox has some rather
> > CPU intensive threads that aren't vCPU threads (their emulated APIC thread
> > immediately comes to mind), and so does QEMU depending on the emulated
>
> And the number of those threads fluctuate widely and dynamically?
>
> > hardware configuration (it gets more noticeable when the disk images are
> > stored on a SAN and served through iSCSI, NBD, FCoE, or ATAoE, which is
> > pretty typical usage for large virtualization deployments). I've seen cases
> > first hand where the vCPU's can make no reasonable progress because they are
> > constantly getting crowded out by other threads.
Hm. Serious CPU starvation would seem to require quite a few hungry
threads, but even a few IO threads with kick butt hardware under them
could easily tilt fairness heavily in favor of VPUs generating IO.
> That alone doesn't require hierarchical resource distribution tho.
> Setting nice levels reasonably is likely to alleviate most of the
> problem.
Unless the CPU controller is in use.
-Mike
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