Re: [ckrm-tech] Re: [Lse-tech] [PATCH] cpusets - big numa cpu andmemory placement

From: Hubertus Franke
Date: Sat Oct 02 2004 - 18:55:36 EST




Peter Williams wrote:

Hubertus Franke wrote:



Paul Jackson wrote:

A minimal quote from your website :-)

"CpuMemSets provides a new Linux kernel facility that enables system services and applications to specify on which CPUs they may be scheduled, and from which nodes they may allocate memory."

Since I have addressed the cpu section it seems obvious that
in order to ISOLATE different workloads, you associate them onto
non-overlapping cpusets, thus technically they are physically isolated
from each other on said chosen CPUs.

Given that cpuset hierarchies translate into cpu-affinity masks,
this desired isolation can result in lost cycles globally.


This argument if followed to its logical conclusion would advocate the abolition of CPU affinity masks completely.


No, why is that. One can restrict memory on a task and by doing so waste cycles in paging. That does not mean we should get ride of memory restrictions or a like.
Loosing cycles is simply an observation of what could happen.

As in any system, over constraining a given workload (wrt to affinity, cpu limits, rate control) can lead to suboptimal utilization of resources. That does not mean there is no rational for the constraints in the first place and hence they should never be allowed in the first place.

Cheers ..


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