Re: [qemu-s390x] [PATCHv2 0/3] add query-cpu-fast and related s390 changes

[Cornelia Huck]

On Tue, 13 Feb 2018 18:18:45 +0100
Viktor Mihajlovski <address@hidden> wrote:

> This series consolidates patches around a performance issue
> caused by the usage of QMP query-cpus.
> 
> A performance issue was found in an OpenStack environment, where
> ceilometer was collecting domain statistics with libvirt. The domain
> statistics reported by libvirt include the vCPU halted state, which 
> in turn is retrieved with QMP query-cpus.
> 
> This causes two issues:
> 1. Performance: on most architectures query-cpus needs to issue a KVM ioctl
>    to find out whether a vCPU was halted. This is not the case for s390
>    but query-cpus is always causing the vCPU to exit the VM.
> 
> 2. Semantics: on x86 and other architectures, halted is a highly transient
>    state, which is likely to have already changed shortly after the state
>    information has been retrieved. This is not the case for s390, where
>    halted is an indication that the vCPU is stopped, meaning its not
>    available to the guest operating system until it has been restarted.
> 
> The following patches help to alleviate the issues:
> 
> Patch 1/3:
>   Adds architecture specific data to the QMP CpuInfo type, exposing
>   the existing s390 cpu-state in QMP. The cpu-state is a representation
>   more adequate than the ambiguous 'halted' condition.
> 
> Patch 2/3:
>   Adds a new QMP function query-cpus-fast, which will only retrieve
>   vCPU information that can be obtained without interrupting the
>   vCPUs of a running VM. It introduces a new return type CpuInfoFast
>   with the subset of fields meeting this condition. Specifically, the
>   halted state is not part of CpuInfoFast. QMP clients like libvirt
>   are encouraged to switch to the new API for vCPU information.
> 
> Patch 3/3:
>   Adds the s390-specific cpu state to CpuInfoFast, allowing management
>   apps to find out whether a vCPU is in the stopped state. This extension
>   leads to a partial duplication of field definitions from CpuInfo
>   to CpuInfoFast. This should be tolerable if CpuInfo is deprecated and
>   eventually removed.

How shall we proceed with this series? Patch 3 depends upon patch 1, so
I think it makes sense to merge this in one go.

I can give my R-b on patch 1 and Someone(tm) can merge this, or I can
take the whole series through the s390 tree (with some further
reviews/acks on patches 2/3).