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[20161105] NetBSD 7.0/xen scheduling mystery, and how to fix it with processor sets
Today I had a need to do some number crunching using a home-brewn C program. In order to do some manual load balancing, I was firing up some Amazon AWS instances (which is Xen) with NetBSD 7.0. In this case, the system was assigned two CPUs, from dmesg:
    # dmesg | grep cpu
    vcpu0 at hypervisor0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz, id 0x306e4
    vcpu1 at hypervisor0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz, id 0x306e4
I started two instances of my program, with the intent to have each one use one CPU. Which is not what happened! Here is what I observed, and how I fixed things for now.

I was looking at top(1) to see that everything was running fine, and noticed funny WCPU and CPU values:

      PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
      2791 root      25    0  8816K  964K RUN/0     16:10 54.20% 54.20% myprog
      2845 root      26    0  8816K  964K RUN/0     17:10 47.90% 47.90% myprog
I expected something like WCPU and CPU being around 100%, assuming that each process was bound to its own CPU. The values I actually saw (and listed above) suggested that both programs were fighting for the same CPU. Huh?!

top's CPU state shows:

    load averages:  2.15,  2.07,  1.82;               up 0+00:45:19        18:00:55
    27 processes: 2 runnable, 23 sleeping, 2 on CPU
    CPU states: 50.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt, 50.0% idle
    Memory: 119M Act, 7940K Exec, 101M File, 3546M Free
Which is not too useful. Typing "1" in top(1) lists the actual per-CPU usage instead:
    load averages:  2.14,  2.08,  1.83;               up 0+00:45:56        18:01:32
    27 processes: 4 runnable, 21 sleeping, 2 on CPU
    CPU0 states:  100% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0% idle
    CPU1 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
    Memory: 119M Act, 7940K Exec, 101M File, 3546M Free
This confirmed my suspicion that both processes were bound to one CPU, and that the other one was idling. Bad! But how to fix?

One option is to kick your operating system out of the window, but I still like NetBSD, so here's another solution: NetBSD allows to create "processor sets", assign CPU(s) to them and then assign processes to the processor sets. Let's have a look!

Processor sets are manipulated using the psrset(8) utility. By default all CPUs are in the same (system) processor set:

    # psrset
    system processor set 0: processor(s) 0 1
First step is to create a new processor set:
    # psrset -c
    1
    # psrset
    system processor set 0: processor(s) 0 1
    user processor set 1: empty
Next, assign one CPU to the new set:
    # psrset -a 1 1
    # psrset
    system processor set 0: processor(s) 0
    user processor set 1: processor(s) 1
Last, find out what the process IDs of my two (running) processes are, and assign them to the two processor sets:
    # ps -u 
    USER  PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY     STAT STARTED     TIME COMMAND
    root 2791 52.0  0.0  8816  964 pts/4   R+    5:28PM 22:57.80 myprog
    root 2845 50.0  0.0  8816  964 pts/2   R+    5:26PM 23:33.97 myprog
    #
    # psrset -b 0 2791
    # psrset -b 1 2845
Note that this was done with the two processes running, there is no need to stop and restart them! The effect of the commands is imediate, as can be seen in top(1):
    load averages:  2.02,  2.05,  1.94;               up 0+00:59:32        18:15:08
    27 processes: 1 runnable, 24 sleeping, 2 on CPU
    CPU0 states:  100% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0% idle
    CPU1 states:  100% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0% idle
    Memory: 119M Act, 7940K Exec, 101M File, 3546M Free
    Swap:

      PID USERNAME PRI NICE   SIZE   RES STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
     2845 root      25    0  8816K  964K CPU/1     26:14   100%   100% myprog
     2791 root      25    0  8816K  964K RUN/0     25:40   100%   100% myprog
Things are as expected now, with each program being bound to its own CPU.

Now why this didn't happen by default is left as an exercise to the reader. Hints that may help:

    # uname -a
    NetBSD foo.eu-west-1.compute.internal 7.0 NetBSD 7.0 (XEN3_DOMU.201509250726Z) amd64
    # dmesg
    ...
    hypervisor0 at mainbus0: Xen version 4.2.amazon
    VIRQ_DEBUG interrupt using event channel 3
    vcpu0 at hypervisor0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz, id 0x306e4
    vcpu1 at hypervisor0: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 v2 @ 2.80GHz, id 0x306e4 
AWS Instance type: c3.large
AMI ID: NetBSD-x86_64-7.0-201511211930Z-20151121-1142 (ami-ac983ddf)

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[20160213] NetBSD on Google's Compute Engine (Update #1)
Benny Siegert posted to Twitter that he got NetBSD going on Google Compute Engine. Similar to Amazon's AWS, Google Compute Engine, according to their website, ``lets you create and run virtual machines on Google infrastructure. Compute Engine offers scale, performance, and value that allows you to easily launch large compute clusters on Google's infrastructure. There are no upfront investments and you can run thousands of virtual CPUs on a system that has been designed to be fast, and to offer strong consistency of performance.''

For more information, see dmesg output.

Update: Twitter link fixed

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[20130324] Ansible & EC2 - Playbooks for orchestrating NetBSD into the cloud
As follower of my blog you have seen the steps towards getting NetBSD instances started in Amazon's EC2 cloud with a simple web application deployed on one EC2 instance and the database on another one.

These blog articles were very detailed on purpose, to have full logfiles available just in case needed. I have used these logs to prepare my pkgsrcCon 2013 talk about Ansible and Amazon's EC2, so things can be looked at without actually running anything. As it turns out this was good, because the 32bit NetBSD instances that I've used during my pkgsrcCon demonstration actually decided to do a kernel panic, and the presentation was a bit more on the theoretical side than I originally planned.

Now after pkgsrcCon is over, I would like to publish the presentation slides with all the details, and especially the playbooks and all other files to look at - enjoy!

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