Date:	Sat, 28 Jul 2007 12:38:23 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Tong Li <tong.n.li@...el.com>
To:	Chris Snook <csnook@...hat.com>
cc:	"Bill Huey (hui)" <billh@...ppy.monkey.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] scheduler: improve SMP fairness in CFS

On Fri, 27 Jul 2007, Chris Snook wrote:

> Bill Huey (hui) wrote:
>> You have to consider the target for this kind of code. There are 
>> applications
>> where you need something that falls within a constant error bound. 
>> According
>> to the numbers, the current CFS rebalancing logic doesn't achieve that to
>> any degree of rigor. So CFS is ok for SCHED_OTHER, but not for anything 
>> more
>> strict than that.
>
> I've said from the beginning that I think that anyone who desperately needs 
> perfect fairness should be explicitly enforcing it with the aid of realtime 
> priorities.  The problem is that configuring and tuning a realtime 
> application is a pain, and people want to be able to approximate this 
> behavior without doing a whole lot of dirty work themselves.  I believe that 
> CFS can and should be enhanced to ensure SMP-fairness over potentially short, 
> user-configurable intervals, even for SCHED_OTHER.  I do not, however, 
> believe that we should take it to the extreme of wasting CPU cycles on 
> migrations that will not improve performance for *any* task, just to avoid 
> letting some tasks get ahead of others.  We should be as fair as possible but 
> no fairer.  If we've already made it as fair as possible, we should account 
> for the margin of error and correct for it the next time we rebalance.  We 
> should not burn the surplus just to get rid of it.

Proportional-share scheduling actually has one of its roots in real-time 
and having a p-fair scheduler is essential for real-time apps (soft 
real-time).

>
> On a non-NUMA box with single-socket, non-SMT processors, a constant error 
> bound is fine.  Once we add SMT, go multi-core, go NUMA, and add 
> inter-chassis interconnects on top of that, we need to multiply this error 
> bound at each stage in the hierarchy, or else we'll end up wasting CPU cycles 
> on migrations that actually hurt the processes they're supposed to be 
> helping, and hurt everyone else even more.  I believe we should enforce an 
> error bound that is proportional to migration cost.
>

I think we are actually in agreement. When I say constant bound, it can 
certainly be a constant that's determined based on inputs from the memory 
hierarchy. The point is that it needs to be a constant independent of 
things like # of tasks.

> But this patch is only relevant to SCHED_OTHER.  The realtime scheduler 
> doesn't have a concept of fairness, just priorities.  That why each realtime 
> priority level has its own separate runqueue.  Realtime schedulers are 
> supposed to be dumb as a post, so they cannot heuristically decide to do 
> anything other than precisely what you configured them to do, and so they 
> don't get in the way when you're context switching a million times a second.

Are you referring to hard real-time? As I said, an infrastructure that 
enables p-fair scheduling, EDF, or things alike is the foundation for 
real-time. I designed DWRR, however, with a target of non-RT apps, 
although I was hoping the research results might be applicable to RT.

   tong
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