On Wed, Jun 02, 2010 at 12:00:27PM +0300, Avi Kivity wrote: > > There are two separate problems: the more general problem is that > the hypervisor can put a vcpu to sleep while holding a lock, causing > other vcpus to spin until the end of their time slice. This can > only be addressed with hypervisor help. Fyi - I have a early patch ready to address this issue. Basically I am using host-kernel memory (mmap'ed into guest as io-memory via ivshmem driver) to hint host whenever guest is in spin-lock'ed section, which is read by host scheduler to defer preemption. Guest side: static inline void spin_lock(spinlock_t *lock) { raw_spin_lock(&lock->rlock); + __get_cpu_var(gh_vcpu_ptr)->defer_preempt++; } static inline void spin_unlock(spinlock_t *lock) { + __get_cpu_var(gh_vcpu_ptr)->defer_preempt--; raw_spin_unlock(&lock->rlock); } [similar changes to other spinlock variants] Host side: @@ -860,6 +866,17 @@ check_preempt_tick(struct cfs_rq *cfs_rq ideal_runtime = sched_slice(cfs_rq, curr); delta_exec = curr->sum_exec_runtime - curr->prev_sum_exec_runtime; if (delta_exec > ideal_runtime) { + if ((sched_feat(DEFER_PREEMPT)) && (rq_of(cfs_rq)->curr->ghptr)) { + int defer_preempt = rq_of(cfs_rq)->curr->ghptr->defer_preempt; + if (((defer_preempt & 0xFFFF0000) == 0xfeed0000) && ((defer_preempt & 0x0000FFFF) != 0)) { + if ((rq_of(cfs_rq)->curr->grace_defer++ < sysctl_sched_preempt_defer_count)) { + rq_of(cfs_rq)->defer_preempt++; + return; + } else + rq_of(cfs_rq)->force_preempt++; + } + } resched_task(rq_of(cfs_rq)->curr); /* * The current task ran long enough, ensure it doesn't get [similar changes introduced at other preemption points in sched_fair.c] Note that guest can only request preemption to be deferred (and not disabled via this mechanism). I have seen good improvement (~15%) in kern compile benchmark with sysctl_sched_preempt_defer_count set to a low value of just 2 (i.e we can defer preemption by maximum two ticks). I intend to cleanup and post the patches pretty soon for comments. One pathological case where this may actually hurt is routines in guest like flush_tlb_others_ipi() which take a spinlock and then enter a while() loop waiting for other cpus to ack something. In this case, deferring preemption just because guest is in critical section actually hurts! Hopefully the upper bound for deferring preemtion and the fact that such routines may not be frequently hit should help alleviate such situations. - vatsa -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe kvm" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html