On asymmetric cpu capacity systems (e.g. Arm big.LITTLE) it is crucial
for performance that cpu intensive tasks are aggressively migrated to
high capacity cpus as soon as those become available. The capacity
awareness tweaks already in the wake-up path can't handle this as such
tasks might run or be runnable forever. If they happen to be placed on a
low capacity cpu from the beginning they are stuck there forever while
high capacity cpus may have become available in the meantime.
To address this issue this patch set introduces a new "misfit"
load-balancing scenario in periodic/nohz/newly idle balance which tweaks
the load-balance conditions to ignore load per capacity in certain
cases. Since misfit tasks are commonly running alone on a cpu, more
aggressive active load-balancing is needed too.
The fundamental idea of this patch set has been in Android kernels for a
long time and is absolutely essential for consistent performance on
asymmetric cpu capacity systems.
The patches have been tested on:
1. Arm Juno (r0): 2+4 Cortex A57/A53
2. Hikey960: 4+4 Cortex A73/A53
Test case:
Big cpus are always kept busy. Pin a shorter running sysbench tasks to
big cpus, while creating a longer running set of unpinned sysbench
tasks.
REQUESTS=1000
BIGS="1 2"
LITTLES="0 3 4 5"
# Don't care about the score for those, just keep the bigs busy
for i in $BIGS; do
taskset -c $i sysbench --max-requests=$((REQUESTS / 4)) \
--test=cpu run &>/dev/null &
done
for i in $LITTLES; do
sysbench --max-requests=$REQUESTS --test=cpu run \
| grep "total time:" &
done
wait
Results:
Single runs with completion time of each task
Juno (tip)
total time: 1.2608s
total time: 1.2995s
total time: 1.5954s
total time: 1.7463s
Juno (misfit)
total time: 1.2575s
total time: 1.3004s
total time: 1.5860s
total time: 1.5871s
Hikey960 (tip)
total time: 1.7431s
total time: 2.2914s
total time: 2.5976s
total time: 1.7280s
Hikey960 (misfit)
total time: 1.7866s
total time: 1.7513s
total time: 1.6918s
total time: 1.6965s
10 run summary (tracking longest running task for each run)
Juno Hikey960
avg max avg max
tip 1.7465 1.7469 2.5997 2.6131
misfit 1.6016 1.6192 1.8506 1.9666
Morten Rasmussen (4):
sched: Add static_key for asymmetric cpu capacity optimizations
sched/fair: Add group_misfit_task load-balance type
sched/fair: Consider misfit tasks when load-balancing
sched/fair: Avoid unnecessary balancing of asymmetric capacity groups
Valentin Schneider (3):
sched/fair: Kick nohz balance if rq->misfit_task
sched: Rename root_domain->overload to should_idle_balance
sched/fair: Set sd->should_idle_balance when misfit
kernel/sched/fair.c | 141 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-------
kernel/sched/sched.h | 15 ++++--
kernel/sched/topology.c | 10 ++++
3 files changed, 142 insertions(+), 24 deletions(-)
--
2.7.4
