FSS shares and the global zone

Question

zonecfg allows me to set an RCTL on the number of FSS shares a zone can use.
How do I set the total number of FSS shares that are available to all the processes in the global zone.
For instance if I have a machine with the global zone and two non-global zones how do I configure the CPU shares so that all the zones get an equal amount of the CPU.
I can balence the two non-global zone equally but how do I balence the non-global zones against the global zone?

Answer 1

zonecfg allows me to set an RCTL on the number of FSS shares a zone can use.
How do I set the total number of FSS shares that are available to all the processes in the global zone.You can use the prctl(1M) utility for now, although you'll need to renew the setting each time you
reboot the system. In the future we hope to have a nicer user interface for this.
For instance if I have a machine with the global zone and two non-global zones how do I configure
the CPU shares so that all the zones get an equal amount of the CPU.Well, that one is easy-- give each zone one share. Then the machine will divide up 1/3, 1/3, 1/3.
Or, use prctl(1M) to give the global zone 2 shares; the machine will divide up 1/2, 1/4, 1/4.
Does that help? Please note also that prctl has some problems with setting zone resource controls;
these are fixed in build 59, which should appear as Solaris 10, Beta5, in another month or so.
Anyway, the incantation which works for me is:
prctl -n zone.cpu-shares -r -v 2 -i process 1
That means: "change zone.cpu-shares, replacing the current value with the new value, 2, and
apply the change to process 1 (init). This is slightly a hack-- and works because the zone.cpu-shares
resource control is shared across all processes in the given zone-- so I've chosen PID 1 as a "representative" of the global zone.
When the aforementioned bug is fixed in build 59, you will be able to instead say:
prctl -n zone.cpu-shares -r -v 2 -i zone global
Which is a little more sensible.
Please accept my apologies for our excessively long delay in answering these questions!