This is an RFC regarding the reporting of stealtime. In the case of where you have a system that is running with partial processors such as KVM the user may see steal time being reported in accounting tools such as top or vmstat. This can cause confusion for the end user. To ease the confusion this patch set adds a sysctl interface to set the cpu entitlement. This is the percentage of cpu that the guest system is expected to receive. As long as the steal time is within its expected range it will show up as 0 in /proc/stat. The user will then see in the accounting tools that they are getting a full utilization of the cpu resources assigned to them. This patchset is changing the contents/output of /proc/stat and could affect user tools. However the default setting is that the cpu is entitled to 100% so the code will act as before. Also another field could be added to the /proc/stat output and show the unaltered steal time. Since this additional field could cause more confusion than it would clear up I have left it out for now. Michael Wolf (3): Add a sysctl interface to control the cpu entitlement setting. Add a hypercall to retrieve the cpu entitlement value from the host. Modify the amount of stealtime that the kernel reports via the /proc --- Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt | 14 +++++++ arch/x86/kvm/x86.c | 8 ++++ fs/proc/stat.c | 80 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++- include/linux/kernel_stat.h | 2 + include/linux/kvm.h | 3 ++ include/linux/kvm_host.h | 3 ++ include/linux/kvm_para.h | 1 + kernel/sysctl.c | 10 +++++ virt/kvm/kvm_main.c | 7 ++++ 9 files changed, 126 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) -- 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