Re: [Qemu-devel] [RESEND][PATCH 0/3] Fix guest time drift under heavy load.

[Gleb Natapov]

On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 09:37:56AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
> Gleb Natapov wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 06, 2008 at 08:40:09AM -0600, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>>   
>>
>>> Gleb: are you perhaps using a qcow2 file in conjunction with 
>>> -snapshot?       
>> I am using qcow2, but without -snapshot.
>>   
>
> Okay, you would still see this if your qcow2 is relatively small  
> compared to the possible size it could be.
>
> I totally believe that you could miss ticks from qcow2 metadata writing  
> even with 100hz clock especially since we're using O_SYNC.  A relatively  
> large write that has to extend the qcow2 file multiple times could  
> conceivably block the guest for more than 10ms.  However, this is a bug  
> in qcow2 IMHO.  Metadata updates should be done asynchronously and if  
> they did, I bet this problem wouldn't occur.  A test against raw should  
> confirm this.
>
I ran the copy test once again with qcow2 image, but this time I copied 
from qcow2 to network fs and the drift still exists. Much smaller
though. 8 second per hour AFAIR.

>>
>>>> If part of qemu gets swapped out then all bets are off, and you can 
>>>> easily stall for significant fractions of a second. No amount of 
>>>> host high resolution time support will help you there.
>>>>         
>>> Running a steady workload, you aren't going to be partially swapped.
>>>
>>>     
>> We want to oversubscribe host as much as possible, and workload will
>> vary during a lifetime of the VMs.
>>   
>
> I understand that we want guest time behave even when we're  
> overcommitting the host CPU.
>
> However, let's make sure we understand exactly what's going on such that  
> we know precisely what we're fixing.  I believe the file copy benchmark  
> is going to turn out to no longer produce drift with a raw image.  If  
> that's the case, you'll need to find another benchmark to quantify drift.
>
Yes indeed. With raw image copy benchmark no longer runs enough time to
produce time drift big enough to be visible. So I ran this disk test
utility http://69.90.47.6/mybootdisks.com/mybootdisks_com/nu2/bst514.zip
for ~12 hours and the time drift was 12 secs (if I weren't so lazy and
wrote bat file to copy c:\windows in a loop I am sure result would be the
same). This is on completely idle host.


> I think the best ones are going to be intense host workload (and let's  
> see how much is needed before we start drifting badly) and high guest  
> frequencies with hosts that lack high resolution timers.  I think with a  
> high resolution guest and no host overcommit, it should be very  
> difficult to produce drift regardless of what the guest is doing.
>
Later I'll try to generate load on a host an see how this affects
guest's time drift.

--
                        Gleb.