Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 23:38:48 +0000
From: Qais Yousef <qyousef@...alina.io>
To: Pierre Gondois <pierre.gondois@....com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@...aro.org>,
	Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@....com>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Lukasz Luba <lukasz.luba@....com>,
	Wei Wang <wvw@...gle.com>, Rick Yiu <rickyiu@...gle.com>,
	Chung-Kai Mei <chungkai@...gle.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/3] sched: Generalize misfit load balance

On 12/21/23 16:26, Pierre Gondois wrote:
> Hello Qais,
> 
> On 12/9/23 02:17, Qais Yousef wrote:
> > Misfit load balance was added to help handle HMP systems where we can make
> > a wrong decision at wake up thinking a task can run at a smaller core, but its
> > characteristics change and requires to migrate to a bigger core to meet its
> > performance demands.
> > 
> > With the addition of uclamp, we can encounter more cases where such wrong
> > placement decisions can be made and require load balancer to do a corrective
> > action.
> > 
> > Specifically if a big task capped by uclamp_max was placed on a big core at
> > wake up because EAS thought it is the most energy efficient core at the time,
> > the dynamics of the system might change where other uncapped tasks might wake
> > up on the cluster and there could be a better new more energy efficient
> > placement for the capped task(s).
> > 
> > We can generalize the misfit load balance to handle different type of misfits
> > (whatever they may be) by simply giving it a reason. The reason can decide the
> > type of action required then.
> > 
> > Current misfit implementation is considered MISFIT_PERF. Which means we need to
> > move a task to a better CPU to meet its performance requirement.
> > 
> > For UCLAMP_MAX I propose MISFIT_POWER, where we need to find a better placement
> > to control its impact on power.
> > 
> > Once we have an API to annotate latency sensitive tasks, it is anticipated
> > MISFIT_LATENCY load balance will be required to help handle oversubscribe
> > situations to help better distribute the latency sensitive tasks to help reduce
> > their wake up latency.
> > 
> > Patch 1 splits misfit status update from misfit detection by adding a new
> > function is_misfit_task().
> > 
> > Patch 2 implements the generalization logic by adding a misfit reason and
> > propagating that correctly and guarding the current misfit code with
> > MISFIT_PERF reason.
> > 
> > Patch 3 is an RFC on a potential implementation for MISFIT_POWER.
> > 
> > Patch 1 and 2 were tested stand alone and had no regression observed and should
> > not introduce a functional change and can be considered for merge if they make
> > sense after addressing any review comments.
> > 
> > Patch 3 was only tested to verify it does what I expected it to do. But no real
> > power/perf testing was done. Mainly because I was expecting to remove uclamp
> > max-aggregation [1] and the RFC I currently have (which I wrote many many
> > months ago) is tied to detecting a task being uncapped by max-aggregation.
> > I need to rethink the detection mechanism.
> 
> I tried to trigger the MISFIT_POWER misfit reason without success so far.
> Would it be possible to provide a workload/test to reliably trigger the
> condition ?

I spawn a busy loop like

	cat /dev/zero > dev/null

Then use

	uclampset -M 0 -p $PID

to change uclamp_max to 0 and 1024 back and forth.

Try to load the system with some workload and you should see something like
attached picture. Red boxes are periods where uclamp_max is 0. The rest is for
uclamp_max = 1024. Note how it being constantly moved between CPUs when capped.


Cheers

--
Qais Yousef

Download attachment "misfit_power.png" of type "image/png" (384120 bytes)

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