Re: Question about the CAT and CMT in Xen

[Meng Xu <xumengpanda@gmail.com>]

Hi Andrew and Chao,

2015-08-31 14:25 GMT-04:00 Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>:
>
> On 31/08/15 18:42, Meng Xu wrote:
>
> Hi Chao,
>
> I'm Meng Xu from the University of Pennsylvania.
>
> We purchased a computer that has Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2618L v3 @ 2.30GHz inside.
> According to http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/communications/cache-monitoring-cache-allocation-technologies.html, Intel E5-2618L v3 should support both CAT and CMT.
>
> I'm playing the latest Xen on the machine to evaluate how CAT and CMT work
> .
>
>
> The commit point I used is in the staging branch, commit 7b99717f62caeac08eea224a177cd28f047ac4b5, which was push on Aug. 17th, 2015.
> I checked that the branch has merged your code.
>
> After I boot up the system, I tried the following commands and it shows some errors.
>
> ***
> My question is
> ***
> :
> 1) Is there any specific BIOS configuration I need to configure?
> 2) The CMT is not enabled by default. Do I need to issue any command to enable it?  I didn't find any document about how to enable it, according to http://xenbits.xen.org/docs/unstable-staging/misc/xl-psr.html. :-(
> 3) I'm not 100% sure if this machine we purchased supports the CAT. Right now, it shows "No such device" on the machine.
> But it may probably because the hypervisor forgot to initialize it?
>
>
> Below is the details of what I tried:
>
> # xl psr-hwinfo
> Cache Monitoring Technology (CMT):
> Enabled         : 0
> Cache Allocation Technology (CAT):
> libxl: error: libxl_psr.c:96:libxl__psr_cat_log_err_msg: CAT is not supported in this system: No such device
> Failed to get cat info
>
> #xl psr-cmt-attach 0
> libxl: error: libxl_psr.c:70:libxl__psr_cmt_log_err_msg: CMT is not supported in this system: No such device
>
> Please let me know if you need any further information to confirm if the machine support the CAT or if it's because there is some issue with the software layer. :-)
>
> Thank you very much for your time and help in this question!
>
> Best regards,
>
> Meng
>
>
> To get started, use "psr=cat,cmt" on the Xen command line.  Neither are enabled by default as they can potentially allocate quite a lot of resources behind the scenes.


Thank you very much for your suggestion! Yes, after adding the
psr=cat:1,cmt:1, the CMT works. Command "
xl psr-hwinfo" shows the total RMID as 31. It means CMT is enabled/working.

However, the CAT is still not enabled on the socket. It have the same
error message:
Cache Allocation Technology (CAT):
libxl: error: libxl_psr.c:96:libxl__psr_cat_log_err_msg: CAT is not
enabled on the socket: No such file or directory
Failed to get cat info


I looked into the xen/arch/x86/psr.c and found that the function
cat_cpu_init() just returned without initializing the variable
"cat_socket_enable".

Both  !cpu_has(c, X86_FEATURE_CAT) and c->cpuid_level <
PSR_CPUID_LEVEL_CAT are evaluated as 1 inside the function
cat_cpu_init().

OK. I understand that  the cpuid info shows that the CPU does not
support CAT. However, according to the table at
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/communications/cache-monitoring-cache-allocation-technologies.html,
 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2618L v3 should support CAT.

I'm not sure which part is incorrect: the hardware or the software?
(Hope Chao could give some insight about this.)

Best regards,

Meng



-- 


-----------
Meng Xu
PhD Student in Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mengxu/