On 26 May 2014 11:16, Preeti U Murthy preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com wrote:
On 05/26/2014 01:19 PM, Vincent Guittot wrote:
On 25 May 2014 12:33, Preeti U Murthy preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com wrote:
Hi Vincent,
On 05/23/2014 09:22 PM, Vincent Guittot wrote:
The imbalance flag can stay set whereas there is no imbalance.
Let assume that we have 3 tasks that run on a dual cores /dual cluster system. We will have some idle load balance which are triggered during tick. Unfortunately, the tick is also used to queue background work so we can reach the situation where short work has been queued on a CPU which already runs a task. The load balance will detect this imbalance (2 tasks on 1 CPU and an idle CPU) and will try to pull the waiting task on the idle CPU. The waiting task is a worker thread that is pinned on a CPU so an imbalance due to pinned task is detected and the imbalance flag is set. Then, we will not be able to clear the flag because we have at most 1 task on each CPU but the imbalance flag will trig to useless active load balance between the idle CPU and the busy CPU.
Why do we do active balancing today when there is at-most 1 task on the busiest cpu? Shouldn't we be skipping load balancing altogether? If we do active balancing when the number of tasks = 1, it will lead to a ping pong right?
That's the purpose of the patch to prevent this useless active load balance. When the imbalance flag is set, an active load balance is triggered whatever the load balance is because of pinned tasks that prevents a balance state.
No I mean this:
sched:Do not continue load balancing when the busiest cpu has one running task
But you can have situation where you have to migrate the task even if the busiest CPU has only 1 task. The use of imbalance flag is one example. You can also be in a situation where the busiest group has too much load compared to the local group and the busiest CPU even with 1 task (at this instant) has been selected to move task away from the busiest group
Vincent
From: Preeti U Murthy preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com
kernel/sched/fair.c | 2 ++ 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)
diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c index c9617b7..b175333 100644 --- a/kernel/sched/fair.c +++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c @@ -6626,6 +6626,8 @@ more_balance: } goto out_balanced; }
} else {goto out; } if (!ld_moved) {}
Regards Preeti U Murthy
Vincent
Regards Preeti U Murthy