linux-kernel - [PATCH V2] sched: Improve load balancing in the presence of idle CPUs

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Message-ID: <20150326130014.21532.17158.stgit@preeti.in.ibm.com>
Date:	Thu, 26 Mar 2015 18:32:44 +0530
From:	Preeti U Murthy <preeti@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	peterz@...radead.org, mingo@...nel.org
Cc:	riel@...hat.com, daniel.lezcano@...aro.org,
	vincent.guittot@...aro.org, srikar@...ux.vnet.ibm.com,
	pjt@...gle.com, benh@...nel.crashing.org, efault@....de,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, iamjoonsoo.kim@....com,
	svaidy@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, tim.c.chen@...ux.intel.com,
	morten.rasmussen@....com, jason.low2@...com
Subject: [PATCH V2] 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@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
---
Changes from V1:
1. Added relevant comments
2. Wrapped lines to a fixed width in the changelog

 kernel/sched/fair.c |    8 +++++---
 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c
index bcfe320..8b6d0d5 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/fair.c
+++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c
@@ -7660,14 +7660,16 @@ static void run_rebalance_domains(struct softirq_action *h)
 	enum cpu_idle_type idle = this_rq->idle_balance ?
 						CPU_IDLE : CPU_NOT_IDLE;

-	rebalance_domains(this_rq, idle);
-
 	/*
 	 * If this cpu has a pending nohz_balance_kick, then do the
 	 * balancing on behalf of the other idle cpus whose ticks are
-	 * stopped.
+	 * stopped. Do nohz_idle_balance *before* rebalance_domains to
+	 * give the idle cpus a chance to load balance. Else we may
+	 * load balance only within the local sched_domain hierarchy
+	 * and abort nohz_idle_balance altogether if we pull some load.
 	 */
 	nohz_idle_balance(this_rq, idle);
+	rebalance_domains(this_rq, idle);
 }

 /*

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