Date:   Thu, 7 May 2020 14:53:05 +0200
From:   Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@...aro.org>
To:     Peng Liu <iwtbavbm@...il.com>
Cc:     Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@....com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@...hat.com>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Ben Segall <bsegall@...gle.com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@....com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] sched/fair: Fix nohz.next_balance update

On Thu, 7 May 2020 at 14:41, Peng Liu <iwtbavbm@...il.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 06, 2020 at 05:02:56PM +0100, Valentin Schneider wrote:
> >
> > On 06/05/20 14:45, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > >> But then we may skip an update if we goto abort, no? Imagine we have just
> > >> NOHZ_STATS_KICK, so we don't call any rebalance_domains(), and then as we
> > >> go through the last NOHZ CPU in the loop we hit need_resched(). We would
> > >> end in the abort part without any update to nohz.next_balance, despite
> > >> having accumulated relevant data in the local next_balance variable.
> > >
> > > Yes but on the other end, the last CPU has not been able to run the
> > > rebalance_domain so we must not move  nohz.next_balance otherwise it
> > > will have to wait for at least another full period
> > > In fact, I think that we have a problem with current implementation
> > > because if we abort because  local cpu because busy we might end up
> > > skipping idle load balance for a lot of idle CPUs
> > >
> > > As an example, imagine that we have 10 idle CPUs with the same
> > > rq->next_balance which equal nohz.next_balance.  _nohz_idle_balance
> > > starts on CPU0, it processes idle lb for CPU1 but then has to abort
> > > because of need_resched. If we update nohz.next_balance like
> > > currently, the next idle load balance  will happen after a full
> > > balance interval whereas we still have 8 CPUs waiting for running an
> > > idle load balance.
> > >
> > > My proposal also fixes this problem
> > >
> >
> > That's a very good point; so with NOHZ_BALANCE_KICK we can reduce
> > nohz.next_balance via rebalance_domains(), and otherwise we would only
> > increase it if we go through a complete for_each_cpu() loop in
> > _nohz_idle_balance().
> >
> > That said, if for some reason we keep bailing out of the loop, we won't
> > push nohz.next_balance forward and thus may repeatedly nohz-balance only
> > the first few CPUs in the NOHZ mask. I think that can happen if we have
> > say 2 tasks pinned to a single rq, in that case nohz_balancer_kick() will
> > kick a NOHZ balance whenever now >= nohz.next_balance.
>
> If we face the risk of "repeatly nohz-balance only the first few CPUs",
> Maybe we could remember the interrupted CPU and start nohz-balance from
> it next time. Just replace the loop in _nohz_idle_balance() like:
>
> for_each_cpu_wrap(cpu, nohz.idle_cpus_mask, nohz.anchor) {
>         ...
>         if (need_resched()) {
>                 ...
>                 nohz.anchor = cpu;
>                 ...
>         }
>         ...
> }
>
> This can mitigate the problem, but this can't help the extreme situation

If we rerun _nohz_idle_balance before the balance interval, the 1st
idle CPUs that has already been balanced will be skipped because there
rq->next_balance will be after jiffies and we will start calling
rebalance_domains for idle CPUs which have not yet been balance.
So I'm not sure that this will help a lot because we have to go
through all idle CPU to set the nohz.next_balance at the end

> as @Vincent put, it always failed in the same CPU.

In the case that i described above, the problem comes from the cpu
that is selected to run the ilb but if we kick ilb again, it will not
be selected again.

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