The "goto force_balance" here is intended to mitigate the fact that
avg_load calculations can result in bad placement decisions when
priority is asymmetrical.
The original commit that adds it:
fab476228b ("sched: Force balancing on newidle balance if local group has capacity")
explains:
Under certain situations, such as a niced down task (i.e. nice =
-15) in the presence of nr_cpus NICE0 tasks, the niced task lands
on a sched group and kicks away other tasks because of its large
weight. This leads to sub-optimal utilization of the
machine. Even though the sched group has capacity, it does not
pull tasks because sds.this_load >> sds.max_load, and f_b_g()
returns NULL.
A similar but inverted issue also affects ARM big.LITTLE (asymmetrical CPU
capacity) systems - consider 8 always-running, same-priority tasks on a
system with 4 "big" and 4 "little" CPUs. Suppose that 5 of them end up on
the "big" CPUs (which will be represented by one sched_group in the DIE
sched_domain) and 3 on the "little" (the other sched_group in DIE), leaving
one CPU unused. Because the "big" group has a higher group_capacity its
avg_load may not present an imbalance that would cause migrating a
task to the idle "little".
The force_balance case here solves the problem but currently only for
CPU_NEWLY_IDLE balances, which in theory might never happen on the
unused CPU. Including CPU_IDLE in the force_balance case means
there's an upper bound on the time before we can attempt to solve the
underutilization: after DIE's sd->balance_interval has passed the
next nohz balance kick will help us out.
Signed-off-by: Brendan Jackman <brendan.jackman@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>
Cc: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170807163900.25180-1-brendan.jackman@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
583ffd99d7