Re: [PATCH v3 6/9] cgroup/cpuset: Add a new isolated cpus.partition type

On Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 10:18:31AM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:

Bugzilla: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=TBD

commit 994fb794cb252edd124a46ca0994e37a4726a100
Author: Waiman Long [off-list ref]
Date:   Sat, 19 Jun 2021 13:28:19 -0400

    cgroup/cpuset: Add a new isolated cpus.partition type

    Cpuset v1 uses the sched_load_balance control file to determine if load
    balancing should be enabled.  Cpuset v2 gets rid of sched_load_balance
    as its use may require disabling load balancing at cgroup root.

    For workloads that require very low latency like DPDK, the latency
    jitters caused by periodic load balancing may exceed the desired
    latency limit.

    When cpuset v2 is in use, the only way to avoid this latency cost is to
    use the "isolcpus=" kernel boot option to isolate a set of CPUs. After
    the kernel boot, however, there is no way to add or remove CPUs from
    this isolated set. For workloads that are more dynamic in nature, that
    means users have to provision enough CPUs for the worst case situation
    resulting in excess idle CPUs.

    To address this issue for cpuset v2, a new cpuset.cpus.partition type
    "isolated" is added which allows the creation of a cpuset partition
    without load balancing. This will allow system administrators to
    dynamically adjust the size of isolated partition to the current need
    of the workload without rebooting the system.

    Signed-off-by: Waiman Long [off-list ref]

Signed-off-by: Waiman Long <longman@redhat.com>

Nice! And while we are adding a new ABI, can we take advantage of that and
add a specific semantic that if a new isolated partition matches a subset of
"isolcpus=", it automatically maps to it. This means that any further
modification to that isolated partition will also modify the associated
isolcpus= subset.

Or to summarize, when we create a new isolated partition, remove the associated
CPUs from isolcpus= ?

Thanks.