[Xen-devel] New CPU scheduler w/ SMP load balancer

[Emmanuel Ackaouy <ack@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Executive summary
-----------------

I have just committed a change to xen-unstable.hg which adds
support for a new Xen CPU scheduler, which should greatly
enhance resource scheduling on SMP systems and provides better
QoS controls.

The new scheduler is not currently the default, so to enable
it you will need to put "sched=credit" on the Xen command line.
Please give it a go and provide us with some feedback as to how
it performs with your workloads!


Detail
------

The new CPU scheduler automatically load balances guest VCPUs
across all available physical CPUs on an SMP host. You no longer
need to manually pin VCPUs to load balance the system. However,
you can restrict which CPUs a particular VCPU may run on using
the existing "vcpu-pin" interface.

Each guest domain is assigned a "weight" and a "cap".

A domain with a weight of 512 will get twice as much CPU as a
domain with a weight of 256 on a contended host. Legal weights
range from 1 to 65535 and the default is 256.

The cap optionally fixes the maximum amount of CPU a guest will
be able to consume, even if the host system has idle CPU cycles.
The cap is expressed in percentage of one physical CPU: 100 is
1 physical CPU, 50 is half a CPU, 400 is 4 CPUs, etc... The
default, 0, means there is no upper cap.

To use the new scheduler, you need to pick up my change. You
will need to upgrade the tools as well as the hypervisor. We
intend to make this the default scheduler in the near future.
Until then, you must specify "sched=credit" on the Xen command
line in your boot loader.

Once you are running with the new SMP credit scheduler, you will
be able to check and modify your domains' weights and caps using
the "xm csched" command:

xm csched -d <domain>                   lists weight and cap
xm csched -d <domain> -w <weight>       sets the weight
xm csched -d <domain> -c <cap>          sets the cap

I'm interested to hear about your experiences using this
scheduler as well as any performance results running your
favorite applications or benchmarks over it.

Enjoy,
Emmanuel.

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