Re: [PATCH 1/1] sched/rt: avoid contend with CFS task

[Qais Yousef <qais.yousef@arm.com>]

On 09/19/19 16:37, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 16:32, Vincent Guittot
> <vincent.guittot@linaro.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 19 Sep 2019 at 16:23, Qais Yousef <qais.yousef@arm.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 09/19/19 14:27, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > > > > > > But for requirement of performance, I think it is better to differentiate between idle CPU and CPU has CFS task.
> > > > > > >
> > > > > > > For example, we use rt-app to evaluate runnable time on non-patched environment.
> > > > > > > There are (NR_CPUS-1) heavy CFS tasks and 1 RT Task. When a CFS task is running, the RT task wakes up and choose the same CPU.
> > > > > > > The CFS task will be preempted and keep runnable until it is migrated to another cpu by load balance.
> > > > > > > But load balance is not triggered immediately, it will be triggered until timer tick hits with some condition satisfied(ex. rq->next_balance).
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Yes you will have to wait for the next tick that will trigger an idle
> > > > > > load balance because you have an idle cpu and 2 runnable tack (1 RT +
> > > > > > 1CFS) on the same CPU. But you should not wait for more than  1 tick
> > > > > >
> > > > > > The current load_balance doesn't handle correctly the situation of 1
> > > > > > CFS and 1 RT task on same CPU while 1 CPU is idle. There is a rework
> > > > > > of the load_balance that is under review on the mailing list that
> > > > > > fixes this problem and your CFS task should migrate to the idle CPU
> > > > > > faster than now
> > > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > Period load balance should be triggered when current jiffies is behind
> > > > > rq->next_balance, but rq->next_balance is not often exactly the same
> > > > > with next tick.
> > > > > If cpu_busy, interval = sd->balance_interval * sd->busy_factor, and
> > > >
> > > > But if there is an idle CPU on the system, the next idle load balance
> > > > should apply shortly because the busy_factor is not used for this CPU
> > > > which is  not busy.
> > > > In this case, the next_balance interval is sd_weight which is probably
> > > > 4ms at cluster level and 8ms at system level in your case. This means
> > > > between 1 and 2 ticks
> > >
> > > But if the CFS task we're preempting was latency sensitive - this 1 or 2 tick
> > > is too late of a recovery.
> > >
> > > So while it's good we recover, but a preventative approach would be useful too.
> > > Just saying :-) I'm still not sure if this is the best longer term approach.
> >
> > like using a rt task ?
> 
> I mean, RT task should select a sub optimal CPU because of CFS
> If you want to favor CFS compared to RT it's probably because your
> task should be RT too

Yes possibly. But I don't think this is always doable. Especially when you're
running on generic system not a special purposed one.

And we don't need to favor CFS over RT. But I think they can play nicely
together.

For example on Android there are few RT tasks and rarely more than 1 runnable
RT task at a time. But if it happened to wakeup on the same CPU that is
running the UI thread you could lose a frame. And from what I've seen as well
we have 1-3 CFS tasks runnable, weighted more towards 1 task. So we do have
plenty of idle CPUs on average.

But as I mentioned earlier I couldn't prove yet this being a serious problem.
I was hoping the use case presented here is based on a real workload, but it's
synthetic. So I agree we need stronger reasons, but I think conceptually we do
have a conflict of interest where RT task could unnecessarily hurt the
performance of CFS task.

Another way to look at the problem is that the system is not partitioned
correctly and the admin could do a better job to prevent this.

--
Qais Yousef

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