Message-ID: <50396173.4020005@parallels.com>
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2012 19:36:19 -0400
From: Glauber Costa <glommer@parallels.com>
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        <peterz@infradead.org>, <mtosatti@redhat.com>, <mingo@redhat.com>,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC 0/3] Add guest cpu_entitlement reporting
References: <20120823231346.11681.1502.stgit@lambeau>  <503708C8.2090401@parallels.com> <1345821066.4950.6.camel@lambeau>
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On 08/24/2012 11:11 AM, Michael Wolf wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-08-24 at 08:53 +0400, Glauber Costa wrote:
>> On 08/24/2012 03:14 AM, Michael Wolf wrote:
>>> This is an RFC regarding the reporting of stealtime.  In the case of
>>> where you have a system that is running with partial processors such as
>>> KVM the user may see steal time being reported in accounting tools such
>>> as top or vmstat.  This can cause confusion for the end user.  To
>>> ease the confusion this patch set adds a sysctl interface to set the
>>> cpu entitlement.  This is the percentage of cpu that the guest system is
>>>  expected to receive.  As long as the steal time is within its expected
>>> range it will show up as 0 in /proc/stat.  The user will then see in the
>>> accounting tools that they are getting a full utilization of the cpu
>>> resources assigned to them.
>>>
>>
>> And how is such a knob not confusing?
>>
>> Steal time is pretty well defined in meaning and is shown in top for
>> ages. I really don't see the point for this.
> 
> Currently you can see the steal time but you have no way of knowing if
> the cpu utilization you are seeing on the guest is the expected amount.
> I decided on making it a knob because a guest could be migrated to
> another system and it's entitlement could change because of hardware or 
> load differences.  It could simply be a /proc file and report the
> current entitlement if needed.   As things are currently implemented I 
> don't see how someone knows if the guest is running as expected or
> whether there is a problem.
> 

Turning off steal time display won't get even close to displaying the
information you want. What you probably want is a guest-visible way to
say how many miliseconds you are expected to run each second. Right?
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