[PATCH cgroup/for-3.11 1/3] cgroup: mark "tasks" cgroup file as insane

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 11:12:36AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 03:50:08PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 10:34:44AM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> > > On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 12:15:56PM +0100, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> > > > On Mon, Jun 03, 2013 at 07:13:02PM -0700, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > > > > Some resources controlled by cgroup aren't per-task and cgroup core
> > > > > allowing threads of a single thread_group to be in different cgroups
> > > > > forced memcg do explicitly find the group leader and use it.  This is
> > > > > gonna be nasty when transitioning to unified hierarchy and in general
> > > > > we don't want and won't support granularity finer than processes.
> > > > 
> > > > With libvirt and KVM we require the ability to put different threads
> > > > in different cgroups for the "cpu", "cpuset" & "cpuacct" controllers.
> > > > This is to allow us to control schedular tunables / placement for
> > > > QEMU vCPU threads, independantly of limits for QEMU I/O threads. So
> > > > requiring all threads of a process to be in the same cgroup isn't
> > > > sufficiently flexible for our needs.
> > > 
> > > For placement of vCPU threads, can we set per thread cpu affinity
> > > (sched_setaffinity()), instead of using cgroups for that purpose.
> > 
> > sched_setaffinity can't overrride affinity already set in the
> > cgroup. So this won't allow for disjoint affinity sets between
> > threads. ie if you use cgroups to bind the process to pCPU 1
> > (to apply all possible non-vCPU threads) and then want to bind
> > vCPU threads to pCPU 2 you can't do it.
> > 
> 
> I thought we don't have to override affinity set in cgroup. Instead
> subdivide that among its child tasks as needed.
> 
> So in above example, we would allow cgroup to have both pcpu1 and pcpu2
> and then set affiinity for vcpu threads as well as non-vcpu threads.




> > eg for cpu/cpuacct/cpuset controllers we have a setup
> > 
> >  <domain cgroup> 0 threads
> >    |
> >    +- vcpu0     1 thread
> >    +- vcpu1     1 thread
> >    +- emulator  n threads
> > 
> > and want complete independance in settings for each of these child
> > cgroups.
> 
> I guess this will not work with single hierarchy as controllers like
> blkio don't support putting threads of process in separate group. All
> threads of a process share iocontext and an iocontext is associated
> with a cgroup.

IIUC, even with unified hiearchy, we're not going to be co-mounting all
controllers at the same mount point. The hiearchy libvirt creates is
the same structure across all controllers, it just has a couple of
extra leaves at the bottom in the cpu,cpuacct,cpuset controllers.

> > > Apart from cpu affinity, what scheduling parameters we want different
> > > between different threads.
> > 
> > Placement isn't the big deal - it is really the cpu.cfs_period_us,
> > cpu.cfs_quota_us and cpu.shares settings that are important ones,
> > along with cpuacct.{stat,usage,usage_percpu} to track utilization
> > across multiple threads.
> 
> Yes, upper limiting cpu usage will become unavailable at thread level
> if we make this change. I guess customers don't care but libvirt might
> internally want to upper limit cpu usage of group of threads. Don't
> know why though. And we don't have this feature available per thread.
> 
> I am hoping there is a way to set priority per thread and that should
> be able to emulate cpu.shares at a thread level.

As described, we already need to set priority on groups of threads to
be able to control all QEMU non-VCPU threads as a single set. Per-thread
settings are too fine and per-process settings are too coarse.

> > For cpuacct, if we only had 1 cgroup for all threads, we'd have to
> > read the process's overall usage and then subtract usage of individual
> > threads. This would really be a step backwards, throwing away the
> > benefits that cgroups brought in allowing setup arbitrary grouping of
> > tasks :-(
> 
> So these per thread utilization stats are exported to user. Curious, In general
> how this per thread/group_of_some_threads data is useful?

It is all about distinguishing utilization of non-vCPU threads in QEMU
from vCPU threads. We have users who make use of this feature in their
mgmt tools.

Daniel
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