Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] newidle_balance() latency mitigation

[Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>]

On Tue, 28 Apr 2020 at 07:02, Scott Wood <swood@redhat.com> wrote:
>
> These patches mitigate latency caused by newidle_balance() on large
> systems, by enabling interrupts when the lock is dropped, and exiting
> early at various points if an RT task is runnable on the current CPU.
>
> When applied to an RT kernel on a 72-core machine (2 threads per core), I
> saw significant reductions in latency as reported by rteval -- from
> over 500us to around 160us with hyperthreading disabled, and from
> over 1400us to around 380us with hyperthreading enabled.

Do you know how each patch contributes to the decrease ? Because patch
3 not only impacts newly idle lb but each and every lb. So most of the
decrease might come from aborting the busy or idle lb at the highest
sched_domai level which scan all cpus and moving newly idle load
balance is not a major part.

>
> This isn't the first time something like this has been tried:
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20121222003019.433916240@goodmis.org/
> That attempt ended up being reverted:
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/5122CD9C.9070702@oracle.com/
>
> The problem in that case was the failure to keep BH disabled, and the
> difficulty of fixing that when called from the post_schedule() hook.
> This patchset uses finish_task_switch() to call newidle_balance(), which
> enters in non-atomic context so we have full control over what we disable
> and when.
>
> There was a note at the end about wanting further discussion on the matter --
> does anyone remember if that ever happened and what the conclusion was?
> Are there any other issues with enabling interrupts here and/or moving
> the newidle_balance() call?
>
> Rik van Riel (1):
>   sched,rt: break out of load balancing if an RT task appears
>
> Scott Wood (2):
>   sched/fair: Call newidle_balance() from finish_task_switch()
>   sched/fair: Enable interrupts when dropping lock in newidle_balance()
>
>  kernel/sched/core.c  |  7 +++--
>  kernel/sched/fair.c  | 72 +++++++++++++++++++++++---------------------
>  kernel/sched/sched.h | 12 +++++---
>  3 files changed, 49 insertions(+), 42 deletions(-)
>
> --
> 2.18.2
>