7:52 p.m.
On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 11:34:43AM +0200, Martin Kletzander wrote:
On Thu, Oct 13, 2016 at 11:34:16AM +1100, Sam Bobroff wrote:
>On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 10:27:50AM +0200, Martin Kletzander wrote:
>>On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 03:04:53PM +1100, Sam Bobroff wrote:
>>>At the moment, guests that are backed by hugepages in the host are
>>>only able to use policy to control the placement of those hugepages
>>>on a per-(guest-)CPU basis. Policy applied globally is ignored.
>>>
>>>Such guests would use
<memoryBacking><hugepages/></memoryBacking> and
>>>a <numatune> block with <memory mode=... nodeset=.../> but no
<memnode
>>>.../> elements.
>>>
>>>This patch corrects this by, in this specific case, changing the QEMU
>>>command line from "-mem-prealloc -mem-path=..." (which cannot
>>>specify NUMA policy) to "-object memory-backend-file ..." (which
can).
>>>
>>>Note: This is not visible to the guest and does not appear to create
>>>a migration incompatibility.
>>>
>>
>>It could make sense, I haven't tried yet, though. However, I still
>>don't see the point in using memory-backend-file. Is it that when you
>>don't have cpuset cgroup the allocation doesn't work well? Because it
>>certainly does work for me.
>
>Thanks for taking a look at this :-)
>
>The point of using a memory-backend-file is that with it, the NUMA policy can
>be specified to QEMU, but with -mem-path it can't. It seems to be a way to tell
>QEMU to apply NUMA policy in the right place. It does seem odd to me to use
>memory-backend-file without attaching the backend to a guest NUMA node, but it
>seems to do the right thing in this case. (If there are guest NUMA nodes, or if
>hugepages aren't being used, policy is correctly applied.)
>
>I'll describe my test case in detail, perhaps there's something I don't
understand
>happening.
>
>* I set up a machine with two (fake) NUMA nodes (0 and 1), with 2G of hugepages
> on node 1, and none on node 0.
>
>* I create a 2G guest using virt-install:
>
>virt-install --name ppc --memory=2048 --disk ~/tmp/tmp.qcow2 --cdrom
~/tmp/ubuntu-16.04-server-ppc64el.iso --wait 0 --virt-type qemu --memorybacking
hugepages=on --graphics vnc --arch ppc64le
>
>* I "virsh destroy" and then "virsh edit" to add this block to
the guest XML:
>
> <numatune>
> <memory mode='strict' nodeset='0'/>
> </numatune>
>
>* "virsh start", and the machine starts (I believe it should fail due to
insufficient memory satasfying the policy).
>* "numastat -p $(pidof qemu-system-ppc64)" shows something like this:
>
>Per-node process memory usage (in MBs) for PID 8048 (qemu-system-ppc)
> Node 0 Node 1 Total
> --------------- --------------- ---------------
>Huge 0.00 2048.00 2048.00
>Heap 8.12 0.00 8.12
>Stack 0.03 0.00 0.03
>Private 35.80 6.10 41.90
>---------------- --------------- --------------- ---------------
>Total 43.95 2054.10 2098.05
>
>So it looks like it's allocated hugepages from node 1, isn't this violating
the
>policy I set via numatune?
>
Oh, now I get it. We are doing our best to apply that policy to qemu
even when we don't have this option. However, using this works even
better (which is probably* what we want). And that's the reasoning
behind this.
* I'm saying probably because when I was adding numactl binding to be
used together with cgroups, I was told that we couldn't change the
binding afterwards and it's bad. I feel like we could do something
with that and it would help us in the future, but there needs to be a
discussion, I guess. Because I might be one of the few =)
So to recapitulate that, there are three options how to affect the
allocation of qemu's memory:
1) numactl (libnuma): it works as expected, but cannot be changed later
2) cgroups: so strict it has to be applied after qemu started, due to
that it doesn't work right, especially for stuff that gets all
pre-allocated (like hugepages). it can be changed later, but it
won't always mean the memory will migrate, so upon change there is
no guarantee. If it's unavailable, we fallback to (1) anyway
3) memory-backing-file's host-nodes=: this works as expected, but
cannot be used with older QEMUs, cannot be changed later and in some
cases (not your particular one) it might screw up migration if it
wasn't used before.
Selecting the best option from these, plus making the code work with
every possibility (erroring out when you want to change the memory node
and we had to use (1) for example) is a pain. We should really think
about that and reorganize these things for the better of the future.
Otherwise we're going to get overwhelm ourselves. Cc'ing Peter to get
his thoughts as well as he worked on some parts of this as well.
Martin
Thanks for the explanation, and I agree (I'm already a bit overwhelmed!) :-)
What do you mean by "changed later"? Do you mean, if the domain XML is changed
while the machine is running?
I did look at the libnuma and cgroups approaches, but I was concerned they
wouldn't work in this case, because of the way QEMU allocates memory when
mem-prealloc is used: the memory is allocated in the main process, before the
CPU threads are created. (This is based only on a bit of hacking and debugging
in QEMU, but it does seem explain the behaviour I've seen so far.)
If this is the case, it would seem to be a significant problem: if policy is
set on the main thread, it will affect all allocations not just the VCPU
memory and if it's set on the VCPU threads it won't catch the pre-allocation at
all. (Is this what you were referring to by "it doesn't work right"?)
That was my reasoning for trying to use the backend object in this case; it was
the only method that worked and did not require changes to QEMU. I'd prefer
the other approaches if they could be made to work.
I think QEMU could be altered to move the preallocations into the VCPU
threads but it didn't seem trivial and I suspected the QEMU community would
point out that there was already a way to do it using backend objects. Another
option would be to add a -host-nodes parameter to QEMU so that the policy can
be given without adding a memory backend object. (That seems like a more
reasonable change to QEMU.)
Cheers,
Sam.