Re: [RFC PATCH v2 0/3] Support CPU hotplug for ARM64

[James Morse <james.morse@arm.com>]

Hi Maran,

On 10/07/2019 17:05, Maran Wilson wrote:
> On 7/10/2019 2:15 AM, Marc Zyngier wrote:
>> On 09/07/2019 20:06, Maran Wilson wrote:
>>> On 7/5/2019 3:12 AM, James Morse wrote:
>>>> On 29/06/2019 03:42, Xiongfeng Wang wrote:
>>>>> This patchset mark all the GICC node in MADT as possible CPUs even though it
>>>>> is disabled. But only those enabled GICC node are marked as present CPUs.
>>>>> So that kernel will initialize some CPU related data structure in advance before
>>>>> the CPU is actually hot added into the system. This patchset also implement
>>>>> 'acpi_(un)map_cpu()' and 'arch_(un)register_cpu()' for ARM64. These functions are
>>>>> needed to enable CPU hotplug.
>>>>>
>>>>> To support CPU hotplug, we need to add all the possible GICC node in MADT
>>>>> including those CPUs that are not present but may be hot added later. Those
>>>>> CPUs are marked as disabled in GICC nodes.
>>>> ... what do you need this for?
>>>>
>>>> (The term cpu-hotplug in the arm world almost never means hot-adding a new package/die to
>>>> the platform, we usually mean taking CPUs online/offline for power management. e.g.
>>>> cpuhp_offline_cpu_device())
>>>>
>>>> It looks like you're adding support for hot-adding a new package/die to the platform ...
>>>> but only for virtualisation.
>>>>
>>>> I don't see why this is needed for virtualisation. The in-kernel irqchip needs to know
>>>> these vcpu exist before you can enter the guest for the first time. You can't create them
>>>> late. At best you're saving the host scheduling a vcpu that is offline. Is this really a
>>>> problem?
>>>>
>>>> If we moved PSCI support to user-space, you could avoid creating host vcpu threads until
>>>> the guest brings the vcpu online, which would solve that problem, and save the host
>>>> resources for the thread too. (and its acpi/dt agnostic)
>>>>
>>>> I don't see the difference here between booting the guest with 'maxcpus=1', and bringing
>>>> the vcpu online later. The only real difference seems to be moving the can-be-online
>>>> policy into the hypervisor/VMM...

>>> Isn't that an important distinction from a cloud service provider's
>>> perspective?

Host cpu-time is. Describing this as guest vcpu's is a bit weird.

I'd expect the statement be something like "you're paying for 50% of one Xeon v-whatever".
It shouldn't make a difference if I run 8 vcpus or 2, the amount of cpu-time would still
be constrained by the cloud provider.


>>> As far as I understand it, you also need CPU hotplug capabilities to
>>> support things like Kata runtime under Kubernetes. i.e. when
>>> implementing your containers in the form of light weight VMs for the
>>> additional security ... and the orchestration layer cannot determine
>>> ahead of time how much CPU/memory resources are going to be needed to
>>> run the pod(s).

>> Why would it be any different? You can pre-allocate your vcpus, leave
>> them parked until some external agent decides to signal the container
>> that it it can use another bunch of CPUs. At that point, the container
>> must actively boot these vcpus (they aren't going to come up by magic).
>>
>> Given that you must have sized your virtual platform to deal with the
>> maximum set of resources you anticipate (think of the GIC
>> redistributors, for example), I really wonder what you gain here.

> Maybe I'm not following the alternative proposal completely, but wouldn't a guest VM (who
> happens to be in control of its OS) be able to add/online vCPU resources without approval
> from the VMM this way?

The in-kernel PSCI implementation will allow all CPUs to be online/offline. If we moved
that support to the VMM, it could apply some policy as to whether a cpu-online call
succeeds or fails.


Thanks,

James

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