On 6 December 2012 14:46, Liviu Dudau Liviu.Dudau@arm.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 12:25:21PM +0000, Vincent Guittot wrote:
On 6 December 2012 13:06, Liviu Dudau Liviu.Dudau@arm.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 11:50:15AM +0000, Vincent Guittot wrote:
On 6 December 2012 11:27, Liviu Dudau Liviu.Dudau@arm.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 06, 2012 at 09:32:11AM +0000, Viresh Kumar wrote:
Hi Vincent,
On 6 December 2012 14:50, Vincent Guittot vincent.guittot@linaro.org wrote: > It's look like you have disabled packing small task in your v13 with 4a29297
It looks like you are referring to an older version of this branch as the commit id's don't match. Can you please check that again?
> In addition, I don't fully understand why you absolutely want to > revert 39b0e77. In the worst case, it will not fully solve what it > should have solved but it doesn't add any regression.
I don't want to, but Liviu and Morten do :) @Liviu/Morten: Your comments
Hi Vincent,
I was just a messenger here, but this is my understanding of where things are:
- Morten has reviewed your patch and had provided comments, mainly pointing towards the fact that the guarantees that the code is trying to provide are not met.
- You have replied/promised to review and update the patch (is that correct?)
- Nothing has happened since in this area (is that true?)
both are true
To us, looking at the code (mainly the while loop in the is_buddy_busy() function), is seem that you are trying to guarantee that the runnable_avg_sum and the runnable_avg_period that you read from the runqueue have not been updated before deciding if that cpu is busy. But there is no reason* why another thread could not update the runnable_avg_sum and then get preempted before updating the runnable_avg_period, which means you will still use the wrong values when doing the "greater than" check in the return statement.
No, I don't want to ensure that values have not been updated before I use them but that both values are coherent.
But that to me and others seems to be false. I've suggested a way that the values might not be coherent and yet your while loop will exit.
Your example is not possible because these values are only updated by the cpu which owns the rq and no thread can preempt this sequence.
So, you're saying that they are going to be coherent anyway? Because the sequence that updates the values cannot be preempted, that's how I read your statement. In that case, why do you need the while loop (and the whole patch) ?
Liviu,
I'm just saying that the use case above can't happen because the fields are not updated by thread but by scheduler and it can't be pre-empted by a thread while updating them. We can have the situation where cpu A updates its fields and cpu B reads them simultaneously. This is the use case that i'm trying to address with this patch.
Regards, Vincent
The other point is that even if your code is "broken" (i.e. you read stale values that still get you out of the while loop) the code works but your estimate of a CPU being busy is off by .... 10% ? In other words, having that while loop in is_buddy_busy() does not change the behaviour of the rest of the code. So the objection is on having the while loop and trying to claim guarantees that are not met. Why not removing the loop?
So if it doesn't change the behavior why removing it ? It make the maintenance of patches series more complex.
Because we don't like adding code that doesn't work as claimed and then justify its presence by arguing that even if it's broken it doesn't change behaviour.
Why having that code in the first place?
All we are suggesting here is that the while loop is broken in its assumptions and that you get the same behaviour if you remove it. If you agree then push a patch that removes the while loop and we are going to be likely in favor of the new patch being included. If you really want to have the values coherent then you need a better mechanism for ensuring that.
Best regards, Liviu
Hope I'm making sense.
- my understanding of the scheduler code is rather incomplete, so I'm
expecting to be proven wrong here.
Best regards, Liviu
> According to my test, sched-pack-small-tasks-v1-arm is enough if you > want to use packing small task on tc2
I didn't get this one. This is what i have included in my tree.
-- viresh
--
| I would like to | | fix the world, | | but they're not | | giving me the | \ source code! /
¯\_(ツ)_/¯