<riel> mikeb: steal time is the time that the CPU (1) had something runnable, but (2) the hypervisor chose to run something else instead
<riel> it's like iowait time, except it is time waiting on the physical CPU to become available
and yes, Xen isn't the only one to have it
s390 has it too
and I guess IBM's power boxes, too
<mikeb> ahh, ok
riel: if there's only one virtual machine running on a box, would you expect steal time to ever get very high (> 50%)?
<riel> does that virtual machine have more virtual cpus than there are physical cpus on the system?
is it a fully virtualized system, with a heavy load on qemu-dm in dom0 ?
<mikeb> riel: good question, possibly
<riel> one virtual cpu can wait on another, and cause steal time