[libvirt-users] NUMA revisited

Moin libvirters, I'm looking into the current numa settings for a large-ish libvirt/qemu based setup and I ended up having a couple of questions: 1) Has kernel.numa_balancing completely replaced numad or is there still a time and place for numad when we have a modern kernel? 2) Should I pin vCPUs to numa nodes and/or use numatune at all, when using kernel.numa_balancing? 3) The libvirt domain xml elements for vcpu and numatune.memory have placement options. According to the docs setting them to auto will query numad for a good placements. Should I keep numad running just for this? 4) Should I still expose the numa topology via cpu.numa.cell if I use the auto placement for vcpu and numatune? 5) Does the cpus attribute in the cpu.numa.cell elements reference vCPU cores or the real physical CPU cores? Most examples reference them as ranges, which confuses me as on my numa hosts node0 has cores 0,2,4.. and node1 the others. I'd like to benchmark a couple of different options using our production workloads once I actually have grasp what combinations could make any sense. Maybe somebody would like to share the cpu/memory/numa settings they ended up with and why? Thanks a lot, Patrick Meyer