Max,

[ Removing Paul's bouncing address... ]

On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 5:59 PM, Max Krasnyansky <maxk@qualcomm.com> wrote:
quoted text
> Nish Aravamudan wrote:
>>
>> Perhaps this is not a welcome comment, but I have been wondering this
>> as I spent some time playing with CPU isolation. Are cpusets the right
>> interface for system configuration?
>>
>> It seems to me that, and the Documentation agrees with me, that
>> cpusets are designed around tasks and constraining in various ways
>> what system resources the tasks have. But may not have been originally
>> designed around the configuration of the system resources itself at
>> the system level. Now obviously these constraints will have
>> interactions with things like CPU hotplug, sched domains, etc. But it
>> does not seem obvious to me that cpusets *should* be the recommended
>> way to achieve isolation.
>>
>> It *almost* makes sense to me to have a separate interface for system
>> configuration, perhaps in a system filesystem ... say sysfs :) ...
>> that could be used to indicate a given CPU should be isolated from the
>> remainder of the system. It could take the form of a file just like
>> "online", perhaps called "isolated". But rather than go all the way
>> through the hotplug sequence as writing to "online" does, it just goes
>> "through the motions" and then brings the CPU back up. In fact, we
>> could do more than we do with cpusets-based isolation, like removing
>> workqueues and stop machine. We would have an isolated_map (I guess)
>> that corresponds to those CPUs with isolated=1 and provide that list
>> in /sys/devices/system/cpu like the online file.
>>
>> Or perhaps it makes more sense to present a filesystem *just* for
>> system partitioning (partfs?). The root directory would have all the
>> CPUs (for now, perhaps memory should be there too) and administrators
>> could create isolated groups of CPUs. But we wouldn't present a
>> transparent way to assign tasks to isolated CPUs (the tasks file) and
>> the root directory would automatically lose CPUs placed in its
>> subdirectories. Perhaps the latter is supported in cpusets by the
>> cpu_exclusive flag, but let me just say the Documentation is pretty
>> bad. The only reference to what this flag does:
>>
>> " - cpu_exclusive flag: is cpu placement exclusive?"
>>
>> I can't tell exactly what the author means by exclusive here.
>>
>> This feels like something I read Max K. proposing a while ago, and I'm
>> sorry if it has already been Nak'd then. It just feels like we're
>> shoehorning system configuration into cpusets in a way that isn't the
>> most straightforward, when we have an existing system layout that
>> should work or could design one that is sane.
>
> What you described is almost exactly what I did in my original cpu isolation
> patch, which did get NAKed :). Basically I used global cpu_isolated_map and
> exposed 'isolated' bit, etc.

Ok, that was what I vaguely recalled from the discussion, thanks.

quoted text
> I do not see how 'partfs' that you described would be different from
> 'cpusets' that we have now. Just ignore 'tasks' files in the cpusets and you
> already have your 'partfs'. You do _not_ have to use cpuset for assigning
> tasks if you do not want to. Just use them to define sets of cpus and keep
> all the tasks in the 'root' set. You can then explicitly pin your threads
> down with pthread_set_affinity().

I guess you're right. It still feels a bit kludgy, but that is probably just me.

I have wondered, though, if it makes sense to provide an "isolated"
file in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/ to do most of the offline
sequence, break sched_domains and remove a CPU from the load balancer
(rather than turning the load balancer off), rather than requiring a
user to explicitly do an offline/online. I guess it can all be rather
transparently masked via a userspace tool, but we don't have a common
one yet.

I do have a question, though: is your recommendation to just turn the
load balancer off in the cpuset you create that has the isolated CPUs?
I guess the conceptual issue I was having was that the root cpuset (I
think) always contains all CPUs and all memory nodes. So even if you
put some CPUs in a cpuset under the root one, and isolate them using
hotplug + disabling the load balancer in that cpuset, those CPUs are
still available to tasks in the root cpuset? Maybe I'm just missing a
step in the configuration, but it seems like as long as the global
(root cpuset) load balancer is on, a CPU can't be guaranteed to stay
isolated?

Thanks,
Nish
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