Re: [Libvir] Extending libvirt to probe NUMA topology
On Mon, Sep 10, 2007 at 09:52:46PM -0400, beth kon wrote:
Daniel,
I'm taking a stab at this work and want to be sure I'm taking the right
approach. I'm new to xen and even newer to libvirt, so have a bit of a
learning curve.
For the topology information, I assume that this will be a call through
xend, similar to xenDaemonNodeGetInfo. It would seem natural to somehow
extend the xenDaemonNodeGetInfo with this additional information except
that you suggested having the output in XML. Can you explain why you
chose XML?
We have to maintain 100% ABI & API compatability against older releases
of libvirt. This means that once we add a function, struct or other
definition in the header files it cannot ever be changed again. So this
means we can't change the virNodeInfo struct to add NUMA info.
For this reason we tend to keep struct's just for use in APIs where the
performance is critical, or data set is unlikely to ever change. So far
we only use structs for virDomainInfo, virNodeInfo, virSchedParam and
virVcpuInfo at this time. For more descriptive data we format information
into an XML document. This makes it very easy to add new XML elements and
attributes to represent new data items. The same compatability rules apply
to XML though - once we add an attribute or element it can never be removed
from the spec. Currently we think putting the NUMA info into XML is the
best approach since it is not performance critical.
There are two ways to implement it with Xen - either talk to XenD and
extract the topology there, or make direct hypercalls. For now it is
probably easiest to talk to XenD, since this isn't performance critical.
Regards,
Dan.
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