Ok, so we found a "solution" that I thought I'll share in case this thread
pops up in a future search.
The problem was that our Redhat 5.x guests still run with a kernel that
lacks the "tickeless" feature, meaning that they are poking the host a 1000
times per second even if they haven't anything to do.
Disabling hyperthreading and most importantly, adding the parameter
"divider=10" to the kernel boot line in grub does indeed lower the cpu
utilization in the hosts almost to 0% when idling.
In our case we use the command
sudo /sbin/grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="divider=10"
To upgrade the /boot/grub/grub.conf file and then we restart the vm.
Thank you everyone for the help.
Xavier
On Mon, Nov 10, 2014 at 8:32 AM, Xavier Naveira <xnaveira(a)gmail.com> wrote:
We tried a minimal installation from CD of RedHat 5.10 and it is the
same.
This should be fairly easy to reproduce:
- Install a RedHat 6.5 hypervisor
- Install a RedHat 5.10 guest in it
- Enjoy your overused CPU
Is there someone with a similar setup out there?
Xavier
On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 12:30 PM, Gianluca Cecchi <
gianluca.cecchi(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 10:48 AM, Xavier Naveira <xnaveira(a)gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> We have installed and added a new hypervisor into the ovirt cluster but
>> this time with disabled HT.
>>
>> I migrated a RedHat 5.10 machine to it and immediately the qemu-kvm
>> process running the vm (freshly installed, just basic packages) began to
>> consume 20-40% CPU as showed running top on the hypervisor.
>>
>> Now that I have a hypervisor to run tests in, what would you suggest the
>> next step is?
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>> Xavier
>>
>>
>>
> If I remember correctly you had to test plain Qemu/KVM on CentOS 6.5 and
> see if the difference is made by oVirt itself or by the OS changed from 5.x
> to 6.y...
> And also compare command line (eventually both in 5.x and 6.x) between
> plain Qemu/KVM and oVirt spawned VMs
> Gianluca
>