[Libvir] Proposal for a new Libvirt function: change number of virtual CPUs

[Daniel Veillard]

On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 05:48:40PM +0200, michel.ponceau at bull.net wrote:
> For our administration, we need to dynamically reduce the number of virtual
> CPUs in each domain, in same way as Xen command "xm vcpu-set". It seems
> that no Libvirt function is currently provided for that purpose. I
> successfully tried some simple changes in libvirt.c an xend_internal.c,
> mainly the following:
>     snprintf(buf, sizeof(buf), "%d", vcpus);
>     return xend_op(domain->conn, domain->name, "op", "set_vcpus", "vcpus",
>                    buf, NULL);
> We suggest to add this new function "virDomainSetVcpus" to Libvirt.

  Hum, let's see. We expose the number of virtual CPUs in the info structure
so yes that's something which is part of what we expose. So that would be

/**
 * virDomainSetVcpus:
 * @domain: a domain object or NULL
 * @nvcpus: the new number of virtual CPUs for this domain
 *
 * Dynamically change the number of virtual CPUs used by the domain.
 * Note that this call may fail if the underlying virtualization hypervisor
 * does not support it or if growing the number is arbitrary limited.
 * This function requires priviledged access to the hypervisor.
 *
 * Returns 0 in case of success and -1 in case of failure.
 */

int virDomainSetVcpus(virDomainPtr domain, unsigned int nvcpus) {
}

> I have not tried the hypervisor and xen store accesses for this function.
> Do you think they would be necessary?

  It would be preferable to go though Xend first at least. I don't think
xenstore is a good idea at this point. Now for the direct hypervisor, I'm
uncertain, it could be a good idea to provide redundancy over xend, I
assume it should not be hard to do that at the hypervisor level, the risk
is introducing incoherence between what xend thinks and what the hypervisor
atually implement :-)

> I am also working on two other functions to reproduce "xm vcpu-pin" and "xm
> vcpu-list" from Libvirt.

  vcpu-list might be a bit subtle as an API design level. Better not allocate
the array in libvirt, but have the user pass an array. Also how much information
would you extract per CPU, just on/off ?

Daniel

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