Re: credit2 data structures

[Juergen Gross <juergen.gross@ts.fujitsu.com>]

On 10/13/2011 02:24 PM, Jan Beulich wrote:
>>>> On 13.10.11 at 12:11, George Dunlap<George.Dunlap@eu.citrix.com>  wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 10:42 AM, Jan Beulich<JBeulich@suse.com>  wrote:
>>> Apart from the possibility of allocating the arrays (and maybe also the
>>> cpumask_t-s) separately (for which I can come up with a patch on top
>>> of what I' currently putting together) - is it really necessary to have
>>> all these, the more that there can be multiple instances of the structure
>>> with CPU pools?
>> I'm not quite sure what it is that you're asking.  Do you mean, are
>> all of the things in each runqueue structure necessary?  Specifically,
>> I guess, the cpumask_t structures (because the rest of the structure
>> isn't significantly larger than the per-cpu structure for credit1)?
> No, it's really the NR_CPUS-sized array of struct csched_runqueue_data.
> Credit1 otoh has *no* NR_CPUS sized arrays at all.
>
>> At first blush, all of those cpu masks are necessary.  The assignment
>> of cpus to runqueues may be arbitrary, so we need a cpu mask for that.
>>   In theory, "idle" and "tickled" only need bits for the cpus actually
>> assigned to this runqueue (which should be 2-8 under normal
>> circumstances).  But then we would need some kind of mechanism to
>> translate "mask just for these cpus" to "mask of all cpus" in order to
>> use the normal cpumask mechanisms, which seems like a lot of extra
>> complexity just to save a few bytes.  Surely a system with 4096
>> logical cpus can afford 6 megabytes of memory for scheduling?
> I'm not concerned about the total amount if run on a system that
> large. I'm more concerned about this being a single chunk (possibly
> allocated post-boot, where we're really aiming at having no
> allocations larger than a page at all) and this size being allocated
> even when running on a much smaller system (i.e. depending only
> on compile time parameters).
>
>> For one thing, the number of runqueues in credit2 is actually meant to
>> be smaller than the number of logical cpus -- it's meant to be one per
>> L2 cache, which should have between 2 and 8 logical cpus, depending on
>> the architecture.  I just put NR_CPUS because it was easier to get
>> working.  Making that an array of pointers, which is allocated on an
>> as-needed basis, should reduce that requirement a great deal.
> That would help, but would probably not suffice (since a NR_CPUS
> sized array of pointers is still going to be larger than a page). We
> may need to introduce dynamic per-CPU data allocation for this...

Couldn't the run-queue data be dynamically allocated and the pcpu-data of
credit2 contain a pointer to it?


Juergen

-- 
Juergen Gross                 Principal Developer Operating Systems
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