Re: [PATCH] spapr: Fix VSMT mode when it is not supported by the kernel

[Lukáš Doktor]

Dne 19. 11. 19 v 16:45 Greg Kurz napsal(a):
> On Tue, 19 Nov 2019 15:06:51 +0100
> Laurent Vivier <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>> On 19/11/2019 02:00, David Gibson wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 05:47:59PM +0100, Greg Kurz wrote:
>>>> On Fri,  8 Nov 2019 16:40:35 +0100
>>>> Laurent Vivier <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Commit 29cb4187497d sets by default the VSMT to smp_threads,
>>>>> but older kernels (< 4.13) don't support that.
>>>>>
>>>>> We can reasonably restore previous behavior with this kernel
>>>>> to allow to run QEMU as before.
>>>>>
>>>>> If VSMT is not supported, VSMT will be set to MAX(8, smp_threads)
>>>>> as it is done for previous machine types (< pseries-4.2)
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> It is usually _bad_ to base the machine behavior on host capabilities.
>>>> What happens if we migrate between an older kernel and a recent one ?
>>>
>>> Right.  We're really trying to remove instaces of such behaviour.  I'd
>>> prefer to completely revert Greg's original patch than to re-introduce
>>> host configuration dependency into the guest configuration..
>>>
>>>> I understand this is to fix tests/migration-test on older kernels.
>>>> Couldn't this be achieved with migration-test doing some introspection
>>>> and maybe pass vsmt=8 on the QEMU command line ?
>>>
>>> ..adjusting the test case like this might be a better idea, though.
>>>
>>> What's the test setup where we're using the old kernel?  I really only
>>> applied the original patch on the guess that we didn't really care
>>> about kernels that old.  The fact you've hit this in practice makes me
>>> doubt that assumption.
>>>
>>
>> The way to fix the tests is to add "-smp threads=8" on the command line
>> (for all tests, so basically in qtest_init_without_qmp_handshake(), and
>> it will impact all the machine types), and we have to check if it is
> 
> Ohhh... it isn't possible to initialize Qtest with machine specific
> properties ? That's a bit unfortunate :-\
> 
>> ppc64/pseries to do that, and there it becomes a little bit complicated
>> for a so small piece of code.
>>
>> So I think the best to do is to revert Greg's patch.
>>
> 
> I'm okay with that since this patch doesn't bring much for the moment.
> 
> But soon, ie. linux-5.5 hopefully, KVM will allow to configure the number
> of presenters in the XIVE and XICS-on-XIVE devices on POWER9. Combined
> with this patch, it will allow to drastically reduce the consumption of
> resources in the XIVE HW, which currently limits the number of VMs that
> can run concurrently with an in-kernel irqchip. So I hope the 'make check'
> you're willing to fix is worth it :-), and BTW you didn't answer David's
> question about the test setup.
> 

Hello Greg, guys,

it is P8 machine using RHEL7 host with a stock kernel-3.10.0-XXXX. If you're 
interested in the whole setup, then:

    ./configure --enable-kvm 
--block-drv-rw-whitelist=vmdk,null-aio,quorum,null-co,blkverify,file,nbd,raw,blkdebug,host_device,qed,nbd,iscsi,gluster,rbd,qcow2,throttle,copy-on-read
    make -j 13
    SPEED=slow make check

Regards,
Lukáš

> Cheers,
> 
> --
> Greg
> 
>> Thanks,
>> Laurent
>>
>

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