[CentOS-virt] what scheduling algorithm does KVM use?
Nick
oinksocket at letterboxes.org
Fri Nov 19 05:36:04 EST 2010
On 19/11/10 00:11, Kenni Lund wrote:
> I think cgroups is the solution, if you want to guarantee resources to some
> guests. I haven't tested it with KVM, but perhaps "nice" and "ionice" can be
> useful as well...the guests are just Linux processes after all.
Just to clarify, it isn't that *I* want to guarantee equal time sharing, it's
that the entire premise of co-scheduling implies that the guest VM's OS may
malfunction if the system doesn't guarantee it, or some approximation of it.
To quote from http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-4960:
> Without coscheduling, the VCPUs associated with an SMP VM would be scheduled
> independently, breaking the guest's assumptions regarding uniform progress.
> We use the term "skew" to refer to the difference in execution rates between
> two or more VCPUs associated with an SMP VM.
>
> Inter-VCPU skew violates the assumptions of guest software. Non-trivial skew
> can result in severe performance problems, and may even induce failures when
> the guest expects inter-VCPU operations to complete quickly. Let's first
> consider the performance implications of skew. Guest OS kernels typically
> use spin locks for interprocessor synchronization. If the VCPU currently
> holding a lock is descheduled, then the other VCPUs in the same VM will waste
> time busy-waiting until the lock is released. Similar performance problems
> can also occur in multi-threaded user-mode applications, which may also
> synchronize using locks or barriers. Unequal VCPU progress will also confuse
> the guest OS cpu scheduler, which attempts to balance load across VCPUs.
N
More information about the CentOS-virt
mailing list