Re: [PATCH v8 0/7] cgroup/cpuset: Support remote partitions

From: Waiman Long
Date: Wed Nov 01 2023 - 14:16:06 EST


On 10/24/23 12:13, Michal Koutný wrote:
On Fri, Oct 13, 2023 at 12:03:18PM -0400, Waiman Long <longman@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[chain]
root
| \
mid1a mid1b
cpuset.cpus=0-1 cpuset.cpus=2-15
cpuset.cpus.partition=root
|
mid2
cpuset.cpus=0-1
cpuset.cpus.partition=root
|
cont
cpuset.cpus=0-1
cpuset.cpus.partition=root
In this case, the effective CPUs of both mid1a and mid2 will be empty. IOW,
you can't have any task in these 2 cpusets.
I see, that is relevant to a threaded subtree only where the admin / app
can know how to distribute CPUs and place threads to internal nodes.

For the remote case, you can have intermediate tasks in both mid1a and mid2
as long as cpuset.cpus contains more CPUs than cpuset.cpus.exclusive.
It's obvious that cpuset.cpus.exclusive should be exclusive among
siblings.
Should it also be so along the vertical path?

Sorry for the late reply. I have forgot to respond earlier.

We don't support that vertical exclusive check in cgroup v1 cpuset.cpu_exclusive.
root
|
mid1a
cpuset.cpus=0-2
cpuset.cpus.exclusive=0
|
mid2
cpuset.cpus=0-2
cpuset.cpus.exclusive=1
|
cont
cpuset.cpus=0-2
cpuset.cpus.exclusive=2
cpuset.cpus.partition=root

IIUC, this should be a valid config regardless of cpuset.cpus.partition
setting on mid1a and mid2.
Whereas

root
|
mid1a
cpuset.cpus=0-2
cpuset.cpus.exclusive=0
|
mid2
cpuset.cpus=0-2
cpuset.cpus.exclusive=1-2
cpuset.cpus.partition=root
|
cont
cpuset.cpus=1-2
cpuset.cpus.exclusive=1-2
cpuset.cpus.partition=root

Here, I'm hesitating, will mid2 have any exclusively owned cpus?

(I have flashes of understading cpus.exclusive as being a more
expressive mechanism than partitions. OTOH, it seems non-intuitive when
both are combined, thus I'm asking to internalize it better.
Should partitions be deprecated for simplicty? They're still good to
provide the notification mechanism of invalidation.
cpuset.cpus.exclusive.effective don't have that.)

Like cpuset.cpus, cpuset.cpus.exclusive follows the same hierarchical rule. IOW, the CPUs in cpuset.cpus.exclusive will be ignored if they are not present in its ancestor nodes. The value in cpuset.cpus.exclusive shows the intent of the users. cpuset.cpus.exclusive.effective shows the real exclusive CPUs when partition is enabled. So we just can't use cpuset.cpus.exclusive as a replacement for cpuset.cpus.partition.

As a result, we can't actually support the vertical CPU exclusion as you suggest above.


They will be ready eventually. This requirement of remote partition actually
came from our OpenShift team as the use of just local partition did not meet
their need. They don't need access to exclusive CPUs in the parent cgroup
layer for their management daemons. They do need to activate isolated
partition in selected child cgroups to support our Telco customers to run
workloads like DPDK.

So they will add the support to upstream Kubernetes.
Is it worth implementing anything touching (ancestral)
cpuset.cpus.partition then?

I don't quite get what you want to ask here.

Cheers,
Longman