Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2023 18:18:38 +0100
From: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@...aro.org>
To: Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@...ia.fr>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...hat.com>, 
	Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@....com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: EEVDF and NUMA balancing

On Mon, 18 Dec 2023 at 14:58, Julia Lawall <julia.lawall@...ia.fr> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have looked further into the NUMA balancing issue.
>
> The context is that there are 2N threads running on 2N cores, one thread
> gets NUMA balanced to the other socket, leaving N+1 threads on one socket
> and N-1 threads on the other socket.  This condition typically persists
> for one or more seconds.
>
> Previously, I reported this on a 4-socket machine, but it can also occur
> on a 2-socket machine, with other tests from the NAS benchmark suite
> (sp.B, bt.B, etc).
>
> Since there are N+1 threads on one of the sockets, it would seem that load
> balancing would quickly kick in to bring some thread back to socket with
> only N-1 threads.  This doesn't happen, though, because actually most of
> the threads have some NUMA effects such that they have a preferred node.
> So there is a high chance that an attempt to steal will fail, because both
> threads have a preference for the socket.
>
> At this point, the only hope is active balancing.  However, triggering
> active balancing requires the success of the following condition in
> imbalanced_active_balance:
>
>         if ((env->migration_type == migrate_task) &&
>             (sd->nr_balance_failed > sd->cache_nice_tries+2))
>
> sd->nr_balance_failed does not increase because the core is idle.  When a
> core is idle, it comes to the load_balance function from schedule() though
> newidle_balance.  newidle_balance always sends in the flag CPU_NEWLY_IDLE,
> even if the core has been idle for a long time.

Do you mean that you never kick a normal idle load balance ?

>
> Changing newidle_balance to use CPU_IDLE rather than CPU_NEWLY_IDLE when
> the core was already idle before the call to schedule() is not enough
> though, because there is also the constraint on the migration type.  That
> turns out to be (mostly?) migrate_util.  Removing the following
> code from find_busiest_queue:
>
>                         /*
>                          * Don't try to pull utilization from a CPU with one
>                          * running task. Whatever its utilization, we will fail
>                          * detach the task.
>                          */
>                         if (nr_running <= 1)
>                                 continue;

I'm surprised that load_balance wants to "migrate_util"  instead of
"migrate_task"

You have N+1 threads on a group of 2N CPUs so you should have at most
1 thread per CPUs in your busiest group. In theory you should have the
local "group_has_spare" and the busiest "group_fully_busy" (at most).
This means that no group should be overloaded and load_balance should
not try to migrate utli but only task


>
> and changing the above test to:
>
>         if ((env->migration_type == migrate_task || env->migration_type == migrate_util) &&
>             (sd->nr_balance_failed > sd->cache_nice_tries+2))
>
> seems to solve the problem.
>
> I will test this on more applications.  But let me know if the above
> solution seems completely inappropriate.  Maybe it violates some other
> constraints.
>
> I have no idea why this problem became more visible with EEVDF.  It seems
> to have to do with the time slices all turning out to be the same.  I got
> the same behavior in 6.5 by overwriting the timeslice calculation to
> always return 1.  But I don't see the connection between the timeslice and
> the behavior of the idle task.
>
> thanks,
> julia

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