[Libvir] RFC: requesting APIs for host physical resource discovery

[Gareth S Bestor]

I agree to some extent, but I might suggest that discovery and exposure of
host system physical resources may be better left to other APIs, since such
functionality has widespread uses outside of virtualization management.

Since you bring it up, we - Open Source CIM interfaces for Xen, via libvirt
- are actually having to face this exact problem today, namely what is/are
good standardized cross-platform cross-distro Linux interfaces for exposing
physical hardware info necessary for virtual resource allocation. Right now
we have a some Open Source Linux CIM providers exposing h/w info mined out
of, say, /proc, but the architecture and distro ifdefs are getting out of
hand... You are quite correct in stating this requirement, and there seems
to be multiple candidates (SMBIOS, HPI, SNMP, etc) but I don't have a good
answer. My concern would be trying to add and solve this problem within the
scope of libvirt.

- Gareth

Dr. Gareth S. Bestor
IBM Linux Technology Center
M/S DES2-01
15300 SW Koll Parkway, Beaverton, OR 97006
503-578-3186, T/L 775-3186, Fax 503-578-3186



|---------+------------------------------>
|         |           "Daniel P.         |
|         |           Berrange"          |
|         |           <berrange at redhat.co|
|         |           m>                 |
|         |           Sent by:           |
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|         |           03/23/06 08:04 AM  |
|         |           Please respond to  |
|         |           "Daniel P.         |
|         |           Berrange"          |
|---------+------------------------------>
  >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                                                                    |
  |       To:       libvir-list at redhat.com                                                                             |
  |       cc:                                                                                                          |
  |       Subject:  [Libvir] RFC: requesting APIs for host physical resource discovery                                 |
  >--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|




The current libvirt APIs allow the host's physical resources to be split up
and allocated to guest domains, however, there is no way to discover what
the available host resources actually are. Thus I would like to suggest the
inclusion of new APIs to enable host resource discovery. As a starting
point
I'd like to be able to query the following information:

  * Number of physical CPUs - ability to enumerate the CPUs in the host,
    both those currently present, and theoretical maximum (to take account
    of hotplug).
  * Amount of RAM  - actual physical RAM present, and that available for
    guest usage (eg discounting that reserved by a hypervisor or equiv)
  * CPU relationship - ie ability to distinguish between CPUs which
    are hyperthread siblings, on same core, or on separate sockets

Alonside these basic queries it would be desirable to add a further
resource
resource management API to allow for setting of a guest domain's CPU
affinity.
ie ability control what CPUs the VMM is allowed to schedule a domain on.

Once this first basic set of caapbilties for resource discovery are
provided
for, then I believe it will be neccessary to provide some more advanced
queries, in particular:

  * NUMA topology - ability to enumerate NUMA nodes, the CPUs associated
    with each node & the RAM range mapped to that node

Regards,
Dan.
--
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