A good news - sorry I wasn't aware of the current stance on arbitrary parameters and can say I completely agree with it.

Scheduler Parameters API sounds interesting - i'll see if I can find time to look into it - if there's anyone who already knows how it works that sees this as a quick patch though, massive points

Henri

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 10:23:59PM +0100, Henri Cook wrote:

Hey all,

I'd quite like the ability to nice my KVM process, on a home basis this
stops my Windows VM locking up my linux desktop when it's under load (or
at least limits it) and in a commercial setting it might be nice to
offer CPU priority to other customers or company backup-services over
customer VPS instances for example.

How does it sound? Any thoughts?

A quick chat in #virt revealed that a method for adding generic KVM
options has been under discussion for ages - I thought i'd throw my two
cents in, what about some sort of expression with variables like:


A method for adding arbitrary KVM options will never be merged in
libvirt....

<cmdstring>{cmd} {options}</cmdstring> (default)

for my nice proposition you could:

<cmdstring>/usr/bin/nice {cmd} {options}</cmdstring>


The intent of libvirt is to provide APIs which can be used across all
hypervisors. Taking the 'nice' example, this is really a schedular
parameter. If we added ability to set 'nice -20' in the XML for KVM,
there is no way we could possibly implement this for Xen. 

So the goal is to find a consistent API representation. Fortunately we
do already have a 'schedular parameters' API in libvirt - we simply
need to decide how to implement this for KVM - a 'nice' setting is
certainly one schedular tunable we'd likely want to support.

So if someone wants to implenment the schedular parameters driver API
for KVM patches welcomed... 

Regards,
Daniel