On Mon, 2018-02-05 at 13:48 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > On Fri, Feb 02, 2018 at 04:06:32PM -0500, Steven Sistare wrote: > > On 2/2/2018 2:59 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > > > > But then you get that atomic crud to contend on the cluster level, which > > > is even worse than it contending on the core level. > > > > True, but it can still be a net win if we make better scheduling decisions. > > A saving grace is that the atomic counter is only updated if the cpu > > makes a transition from idle to busy or vice versa. > > Which can still be a very high rate for some workloads. I always forget > which, but there are plenty workloads that have very frequenct very > short idle times. Mike, do you remember what comes apart when we take > out the sysctl_sched_migration_cost test in idle_balance()?
Used to be anything scheduling cross-core heftily suffered, ie pretty much any localhost communication heavy load. I just tried disabling it in 4.13 though (pre pti cliff), tried tbench, and it made zip squat difference. I presume that's due to the meanwhile added this_rq->rd- >overload and/or curr_cost checks. I don't recall the original cost details beyond it having been "a sh*tload". -Mike