linux/kernel/sched
Preeti U Murthy d4573c3e1c sched: Improve load balancing in the presence of idle CPUs
When a CPU is kicked to do nohz idle balancing, it wakes up to do load
balancing on itself, followed by load balancing on behalf of idle CPUs.
But it may end up with load after the load balancing attempt on itself.
This aborts nohz idle balancing. As a result several idle CPUs are left
without tasks till such a time that an ILB CPU finds it unfavorable to
pull tasks upon itself. This delays spreading of load across idle CPUs
and worse, clutters only a few CPUs with tasks.

The effect of the above problem was observed on an SMT8 POWER server
with 2 levels of numa domains. Busy loops equal to number of cores were
spawned. Since load balancing on fork/exec is discouraged across numa
domains, all busy loops would start on one of the numa domains. However
it was expected that eventually one busy loop would run per core across
all domains due to nohz idle load balancing. But it was observed that it
took as long as 10 seconds to spread the load across numa domains.

Further investigation showed that this was a consequence of the
following:

 1. An ILB CPU was chosen from the first numa domain to trigger nohz idle
    load balancing [Given the experiment, upto 6 CPUs per core could be
    potentially idle in this domain.]

 2. However the ILB CPU would call load_balance() on itself before
    initiating nohz idle load balancing.

 3. Given cores are SMT8, the ILB CPU had enough opportunities to pull
    tasks from its sibling cores to even out load.

 4. Now that the ILB CPU was no longer idle, it would abort nohz idle
    load balancing

As a result the opportunities to spread load across numa domains were
lost until such a time that the cores within the first numa domain had
equal number of tasks among themselves.  This is a pretty bad scenario,
since the cores within the first numa domain would have as many as 4
tasks each, while cores in the neighbouring numa domains would all
remain idle.

Fix this, by checking if a CPU was woken up to do nohz idle load
balancing, before it does load balancing upon itself. This way we allow
idle CPUs across the system to do load balancing which results in
quicker spread of load, instead of performing load balancing within the
local sched domain hierarchy of the ILB CPU alone under circumstances
such as above.

Signed-off-by: Preeti U Murthy <preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
Cc: benh@kernel.crashing.org
Cc: daniel.lezcano@linaro.org
Cc: efault@gmx.de
Cc: iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com
Cc: morten.rasmussen@arm.com
Cc: pjt@google.com
Cc: riel@redhat.com
Cc: srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Cc: svaidy@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Cc: tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com
Cc: vincent.guittot@linaro.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20150326130014.21532.17158.stgit@preeti.in.ibm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
2015-03-27 09:36:09 +01:00
..
auto_group.c sched/autogroup: Fix failure to set cpu.rt_runtime_us 2015-02-18 16:17:20 +01:00
auto_group.h Revert "sched/autogroup: Fix crash on reboot when autogroup is disabled" 2012-12-11 10:23:45 +01:00
clock.c kernel/sched/clock.c: add another clock for use with the soft lockup watchdog 2015-02-12 18:54:13 -08:00
completion.c sched/completion: Serialize completion_done() with complete() 2015-02-18 14:27:40 +01:00
core.c sched: Add SD_PREFER_SIBLING for SMT level 2015-03-27 09:36:05 +01:00
cpuacct.c cgroup: rename cgroup_subsys->base_cftypes to ->legacy_cftypes 2014-07-15 11:05:09 -04:00
cpuacct.h sched/cpuacct: Initialize root cpuacct earlier 2013-04-10 13:54:20 +02:00
cpudeadline.c sched/deadline: Remove cpu_active_mask from cpudl_find() 2015-02-04 07:52:29 +01:00
cpudeadline.h sched/deadline: Modify cpudl::free_cpus to reflect rd->online 2015-01-30 19:39:16 +01:00
cpupri.c Merge commit '3cf2f34' into sched/core, to fix build error 2014-06-12 13:46:37 +02:00
cpupri.h sched/cpupri: Remove unnecessary definitions in cpupri.h 2014-11-16 10:58:59 +01:00
cputime.c sched, time: Fix build error with 64 bit cputime_t on 32 bit systems 2014-10-03 05:46:55 +02:00
deadline.c sched/deadline: Add rq->clock update skip for dl task yield 2015-03-10 05:46:50 +01:00
debug.c sched: Track group sched_entity usage contributions 2015-03-27 09:35:58 +01:00
fair.c sched: Improve load balancing in the presence of idle CPUs 2015-03-27 09:36:09 +01:00
features.h sched/rt: Use IPI to trigger RT task push migration instead of pulling 2015-03-23 10:55:22 +01:00
idle_task.c sched: Provide update_curr callbacks for stop/idle scheduling classes 2014-11-23 14:14:40 -08:00
idle.c cpuidle / sleep: Use broadcast timer for states that stop local timer 2015-03-05 23:13:19 +01:00
Makefile ftrace: allow architectures to specify ftrace compile options 2015-01-29 09:19:19 +01:00
proc.c cpuidle: menu: Lookup CPU runqueues less 2014-08-06 21:17:45 +02:00
rt.c sched/rt: Use IPI to trigger RT task push migration instead of pulling 2015-03-23 10:55:22 +01:00
sched.h sched: Optimize freq invariant accounting 2015-03-27 09:36:08 +01:00
stats.c sched: use %*pb[l] to print bitmaps including cpumasks and nodemasks 2015-02-13 21:21:37 -08:00
stats.h sched: Micro-optimize by dropping unnecessary task_rq() calls 2013-09-25 13:51:06 +02:00
stop_task.c sched: Provide update_curr callbacks for stop/idle scheduling classes 2014-11-23 14:14:40 -08:00
wait.c sched/wait: Fix a kthread race with wait_woken() 2014-11-04 07:17:44 +01:00