Qubes Cpu Pinning: automatically pin CPUs for VMs

[Atrate]

@Talkabout

@Atrate for your CPU pinning script, have you considered to add an option to pin to performance cores only when machine is ac powered? In case it is in battery mode it might not be expected to “waste” battery life by only using the “non-optimized” cores.
I will research today a little bit how this can be achieved and will report back.

@Talkabout Audio dropouts and stutter - #40 by Talkabout I presume you meant this script and not Window Boost.

It would be very easy to implement with psutil:

user@dom0 ~ % python3
Python 3.11.6 (main, Oct  3 2023, 00:00:00) [GCC 12.3.1 20230508 (Red Hat 12.3.1-1)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import psutil
>>> psutil.sensors_battery().power_plugged
True

Personally, I’d still prefer to pin qubes to p-cores even on battery power, but I can see your use-case.

Implementing this in the vCPU pinning script would be very simple and I will gladly accept a PR (or do it myself, but I don’t think I’ll have time right now). It would not apply to aleady-started qubes, though, so that makes me think that it may be a good idea to also write something that would use udev triggers to re-pin all VMs to e-cores on battery power. Technically it could be integrated within this script, too (maybe via pyudev).

EDIT:

For what it’s worth, it may also be interesting to consider applying settings for xen_hwp, e.g. xenpm set-cpufreq-hwp powersave maximum:25 for power saving and xenpm set-cpufreq-hwp balance otherwise.