[PATCH v2 0/5] Scan for an idle sibling in a single pass

[Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>]

Changlog since v1
o Move extern declaration to header for coding style
o Remove unnecessary parameter from __select_idle_cpu

This series of 5 patches reposts three patches from Peter entitled
"select_idle_sibling() wreckage". It only scans the runqueues in a single
pass when searching for an idle sibling.

Two patches from Peter were dropped. The first patch altered how scan
depth was calculated. Scan depth deletion is a random number generator
with two major limitations. The avg_idle time is based on the time
between a CPU going idle and being woken up clamped approximately by
2*sysctl_sched_migration_cost.  This is difficult to compare in a sensible
fashion to avg_scan_cost. The second issue is that only the avg_scan_cost
of scan failures is recorded and it does not decay.  This requires deeper
surgery that would justify a patch on its own although Peter notes that
https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180530143105.977759909@infradead.org is
potentially useful for an alternative avg_idle metric.

The second patch dropped converted the idle core scan throttling
mechanism to SIS_PROP. While this would unify the throttling of core
and CPU scanning, it was not free of regressions and has_idle_cores is
a fairly effective throttling mechanism with the caveat that it can have
a lot of false positives for workloads like hackbench.

Peter's series tried to solve three problems at once, this subset addresses
one problem. As with anything select_idle_sibling, it's a mix of wins and
losses but won more than it lost across a range of workloads and machines.

 kernel/sched/core.c     |  18 +++--
 kernel/sched/fair.c     | 157 ++++++++++++++++++++--------------------
 kernel/sched/features.h |   1 -
 kernel/sched/sched.h    |   2 +
 4 files changed, 93 insertions(+), 85 deletions(-)

-- 
2.26.2