linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] sched/fair: check for idle core

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Date:   Wed, 21 Oct 2020 14:25:32 +0200
From:   Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@...aro.org>
To:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>
Cc:     Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall@...ia.fr>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>,
        kernel-janitors@...r.kernel.org,
        Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
        Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@...hat.com>,
        Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@....com>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>,
        Ben Segall <bsegall@...gle.com>,
        Daniel Bristot de Oliveira <bristot@...hat.com>,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@....com>,
        Gilles.Muller@...ia.fr
Subject: Re: [PATCH] sched/fair: check for idle core

Le mercredi 21 oct. 2020 à 12:20:38 (+0100), Mel Gorman a écrit :
> On Tue, Oct 20, 2020 at 06:37:59PM +0200, Julia Lawall wrote:
> > On a thread wakeup, the change [1] from runnable load average to load
> > average for comparing candidate cores means that recent short-running
> > daemons on the core where a thread ran previously can be considered to
> > have a higher load than the core performing the wakeup, even when the
> > core where the thread ran previously is currently idle.  This can
> > cause a thread to migrate, taking the place of some other thread that
> > is about to wake up, and so on.  To avoid unnecessary migrations,
> > extend wake_affine_idle to check whether the core where the thread
> > previously ran is currently idle, and if so return that core as the
> > target.
> > 
> > [1] commit 11f10e5420f6ce ("sched/fair: Use load instead of runnable
> > load in wakeup path")
> > 
> > This particularly has an impact when using passive (intel_cpufreq)
> > power management, where kworkers run every 0.004 seconds on all cores,
> > increasing the likelihood that an idle core will be considered to have
> > a load.
> > 
> > The following numbers were obtained with the benchmarking tool
> > hyperfine (https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine) on the NAS parallel
> > benchmarks (https://www.nas.nasa.gov/publications/npb.html).  The
> > tests were run on an 80-core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E7-8870 v4 @
> > 2.10GHz.  Active (intel_pstate) and passive (intel_cpufreq) power
> > management were used.  Times are in seconds.  All experiments use all
> > 160 hardware threads.
> > 
> > 	v5.9/active		v5.9+patch/active
> > bt.C.c	24.725724+-0.962340	23.349608+-1.607214
> > lu.C.x	29.105952+-4.804203	25.249052+-5.561617
> > sp.C.x	31.220696+-1.831335	30.227760+-2.429792
> > ua.C.x	26.606118+-1.767384	25.778367+-1.263850
> > 
> > 	v5.9/passive		v5.9+patch/passive
> > bt.C.c	25.330360+-1.028316	23.544036+-1.020189
> > lu.C.x	35.872659+-4.872090	23.719295+-3.883848
> > sp.C.x	32.141310+-2.289541	29.125363+-0.872300
> > ua.C.x	29.024597+-1.667049	25.728888+-1.539772
> > 
> > On the smaller data sets (A and B) and on the other NAS benchmarks
> > there is no impact on performance.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Julia Lawall <Julia.Lawall@...ia.fr>
> 
> I suspect that the benefit of this patch is due to avoiding the overhead
> of wake_affine_weight() check because the following check exists in
> select_idle_sibling
> 
>         /*
>          * If the previous CPU is cache affine and idle, don't be stupid:
>          */
>         if (prev != target && cpus_share_cache(prev, target) &&
>             (available_idle_cpu(prev) || sched_idle_cpu(prev)))
>                 return prev;
> 
> Still, the concept makes some sense to avoid wake_affine_weight but look
> at the earlier part of wake_affine_idle()
> 
>         if (available_idle_cpu(this_cpu) && cpus_share_cache(this_cpu, prev_cpu))
>                 return available_idle_cpu(prev_cpu) ? prev_cpu : this_cpu;
> 
> This thing is almost completely useless because this_cpu is only going to
> be idle if it's a wakeup from interrupt context when the CPU was otherwise
> idle *but* it takes care to only use the CPU if this and prev share LLC.
> 
> The patch as it stands may leave a task on a remote node when it should
> have been pulled local to the waker because prev happened to be idle. This
> is not guaranteed because a node could have multiple LLCs and prev is
> still appropriate but that's a different problem entirely and requires
> much deeper surgery. Still, not pulling a task from a remote node is
> a change in expected behaviour. While it's possible that NUMA domains
> will not even reach this path, it depends on the NUMA distance as can
> be seen in sd_init() for the setting of SD_WAKE_AFFINE so I think the
> cpus_share_cache check is necessary.
> 
> I think it would be more appropriate to rework that block that checks
> this_cpu to instead check if the CPUs share cache first and then return one
> of them (preference to prev based on the comment above it about avoiding
> a migration) if either one is idle.
> 
> I see Vincent already agreed with the patch so I could be wrong.  Vincent,
> did I miss something stupid?

This patch fixes the problem that we don't favor anymore the prev_cpu when it is idle since
commit 11f10e5420f6ce because load is not null when cpu is idle whereas runnable_load was
And this is important because this will then decide in which LLC we will looks for a cpu

> 
> -- 
> Mel Gorman
> SUSE Labs