Date:	Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:45:16 +1000
From:	Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au>
To:	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
Cc:	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>,
	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Stefani Seibold <stefani@...bold.net>,
	Dario Faggioli <raistlin@...ux.it>,
	Max Krasnyansky <maxk@...lcomm.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 6/6] sched: disabled rt-bandwidth by default

On Thursday 28 August 2008 23:07, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@...oo.com.au> wrote:
> > There is no customer issue and there is no handwaving about
> > compliance;
>
> well, the reason i'm asking is that i cannot for anything in the world
> imagine you being so upset about _anything_ but something that involves
> benchmark runs ;-)

;) Well yes as you know I'm not actively doing much scheduler work for
a while now. Luckily there are a lot of really good people who probably
do a better job on it than me anyway, so on the whole I'm quite happy
with it.

But ironically that's also why I hadn't raised my concerns earlier... I
simply was not aware of the change. So I wish I had participated in the
discussion earlier, but that's life, so I have to raise my concern now.


> And what does SCHED_FIFO RT policy scheduling have to do with
> performance and benchmarks? Nothing usually in the real world, except
> for this little known fact: a common 'tuning' for TPC database
> benchmarks is to run all DB threads as SCHED_FIFO to squeeze the last
> 0.1% of performance out of the setup.
>
> So - and i'm taking an educated guess here - is SCHED_FIFO+TPC
> performance perhaps one of the factors that played a role in you
> initiating this thread? If yes then it's obviously an incredibly broken
> use of SCHED_FIFO and we can add the sysctl tuning to the long list of
> dozens of other tunings that happen before a TPC run anyway.
>
> Hm?

To address this concern: no, it is not tpc ;) Actually I don't know a
thing about how tpc except what scant information can basically be
gained on the list (disclaimer: I probably could find out more under
NDA, but I don't care to).

No, there is no customer behind the scenes and nor do I have a use
case myself. I really would have told you about it by now.

I'm concerned because I honestly think there is a risk of breaking
systems. I also think that in this problem space, people often care
about guard bands and worst case scenarios so even if the app does
not do a cpu hogging polling loop or cooperative scheduling or
anything like that, then I think it is risky to add this source of
uncertianty.

The other issue is that the old behaviour (and, dare I say it,
specification) is quite straightforward. At least it is simpler and thus
I guess easier to analyze than this behaviour with the added caveat.

I realise that as Linux gets better at this, people are wanting to use
-rt programs like audio mixing on their desktops and for that kind of
thing, throttling is probably often the desired behaviour. So I can
see why it was implemented. I just think it is a nasty surprise to
have this behaviour by default in the kernel.

I hope I explained myself better now. I was not being too constructive
when I was getting heated.

What I would like to see is maybe a new SCHED_ policy or two which can
be defined basically as rt-with-throttle which some apps could use. I
also think the sysctl to throttle it is a fine idea. And for desktop
installations there is probably a much stronger argument for it. But I
disagree with having it default from kernel.org like this.

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