[openstack-dev] [nova] NUMA, huge pages, and scheduling

Tim Bell Tim.Bell at cern.ch
Fri Jun 3 17:01:48 UTC 2016


The documentation at http://docs.openstack.org/admin-guide/compute-flavors.html is gradually improving. Are there areas which were not covered in your clarifications ? If so, we should fix the documentation too since this is a complex area to configure and good documentation is a great help.

BTW, there is also an issue around how the RAM for the BIOS is shadowed. I can’t find the page from a quick google but we found an imbalance when we used 2GB pages as the RAM for BIOS shadowing was done by default in the memory space for only one of the NUMA spaces.

Having a look at the KVM XML can also help a bit if you are debugging.

Tim

From: Paul Michali <pc at michali.net>
Reply-To: "OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)" <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Date: Friday 3 June 2016 at 15:18
To: "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange at redhat.com>, "OpenStack Development Mailing List (not for usage questions)" <openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org>
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [nova] NUMA, huge pages, and scheduling

See PCM inline...
On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 8:44 AM Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com<mailto:berrange at redhat.com>> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 12:32:17PM +0000, Paul Michali wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I've been playing with Liberty code a bit and had some questions that I'm
> hoping Nova folks may be able to provide guidance on...
>
> If I set up a flavor with hw:mem_page_size=2048, and I'm creating (Cirros)
> VMs with size 1024, will the scheduling use the minimum of the number of

1024 what units ? 1024 MB, or 1024 huge pages aka 2048 MB ?

PCM: I was using small flavor, which is 2 GB. So that's 2048 MB and the page size is 2048K, so 1024 pages? Hope I have the units right.



> huge pages available and the size requested for the VM, or will it base
> scheduling only on the number of huge pages?
>
> It seems to be doing the latter, where I had 1945 huge pages free, and
> tried to create another VM (1024) and Nova rejected the request with "no
> hosts available".

From this I'm guessing you're meaning 1024 huge pages aka 2 GB earlier.

Anyway, when you request huge pages to be used for a flavour, the
entire guest RAM must be able to be allocated from huge pages.
ie if you have a guest with 2 GB of RAM, you must have 2 GB worth
of huge pages available. It is not possible for a VM to use
1.5 GB of huge pages and 500 MB of normal sized pages.

PCM: Right, so, with 2GB of RAM, I need 1024 huge pages of size 2048K. In this case, there are 1945 huge pages available, so I was wondering why it failed. Maybe I'm confusing sizes/pages?



> Is this still the same for Mitaka?

Yep, this use of huge pages has not changed.

> Where could I look in the code to see how the scheduling is determined?

Most logic related to huge pages is in nova/virt/hardware.py

> If I use mem_page_size=large (what I originally had), should it evenly
> assign huge pages from the available NUMA nodes (there are two in my case)?
>
> It looks like it was assigning all VMs to the same NUMA node (0) in this
> case. Is the right way to change to 2048, like I did above?

Nova will always avoid spreading your VM across 2 host NUMA nodes,
since that gives bad performance characteristics. IOW, it will always
allocate huge pages from the NUMA node that the guest will run on. If
you explicitly want your VM to spread across 2 host NUMA nodes, then
you must tell nova to create 2 *guest* NUMA nodes for the VM. Nova
will then place each guest NUMA node, on a separate host NUMA node
and allocate huge pages from node to match. This is done using
the hw:numa_nodes=2 parameter on the flavour

PCM: Gotcha, but that was not the issue I'm seeing. With this small flavor (2GB = 1024 pages), I had 13107 huge pages initially. As I created VMs, they were *all* placed on the same NUMA node (0). As a result, when I got to more than have the available pages, Nova failed to allow further VMs, even though I had 6963 available on one compute node, and 5939 on another.

It seems that all the assignments were to node zero. Someone suggested to me to set mem_page_size to 2048, and at that point it started assigning to both NUMA nodes evenly.

Thanks for the help!!!


Regards,

PCM


> Again, has this changed at all in Mitaka?

Nope. Well aside from random bug fixes.

Regards,
Daniel
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