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Steal Time always zero

Posted: 10. Jun 2010, 17:21
by b.eckenfels
Recent Linux Kernels provide a scheduler statistics called Stealtime. It is visible in current vmstat -s and top outputs. It is basically the number of ticks the guest could not use the cpu because it was used by another process on the host.

This is quite good to find CPU contention. The number is always 0 in my Linux Guest even when I pin virtualbox and another memory hog to the same host cpu (creating effectively 50% steal time).

I suspect this feature is not implemented in VB yet. Is there a way to get it working with this kind of virtualization at all, or does it require paravirt support? This is an older Dual Xeon 32bit System with XP Host and RHEL55 guest, the CPU does not support HW virtualization. vb 2.1.2

Bernd