[PATCH v6 00/16] Add utilization clamping support

Patrick Bellasi
2019-01-15T10:14:57Z

Hi all, this is a respin of:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181029183311.29175-1-patrick.bellasi@arm.com/

which addresses all the comments collected in the previous posting and during
the LPC presentation [1].

It's based on v5.0-rc2, the full tree is available here:

git://linux-arm.org/linux-pb.git lkml/utilclamp_v6
http://www.linux-arm.org/git?p=linux-pb.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/lkml/utilclamp_v6

Changes in this version are:

- rebased on top of recently merged EAS code [3] and better integrated with it
- squashed bucketization patch into previous patches
- wholesale s/group/bucket/
- wholesale s/_{get,put}/_{inc,dec}/ to match refcount APIs
- updated cmpxchg loops to looks like "do { } while (cmpxchg(ptr, old, new) != old)"
- switched to usage of try_cmpxchg()
- use SCHED_WARN_ON() instead of CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG guarded blocks
- moved UCLAMP_FLAG_IDLE management into dedicated functions, i.e.
uclamp_idle_value() and uclamp_idle_reset()
- switched from rq::uclamp::flags to rq::uclamp_flags,
since now rq::uclamp is a per-clamp_id array
- added size check in sched_copy_attr()
- ensure se_count will never underflow
- better comment invariant conditions
- consistently use unary (++/--) operators
- redefined UCLAMP_GROUPS_COUNT range to be [5..20]
- added and make use of the bit_for() macro
- replaced some ifdifery with IS_ENABLED() checks
- overall documentation review to match new subsystem/maintainer
handbook for tip/sched/core

Thanks to all the valuable comments, hopefully this should be a reasonably
stable version for all the core scheduler bits. Thus, I hope we should
be in a good position to unlock Tejun [2] to delve into the review of
the proposed cgroup integration, but let see what Peter and Ingo think
before.

Cheers Patrick

Series Organization
===================

The series is organized into these main sections:

- Patches [01-07]: Per task (primary) API
- Patches [08-09]: Schedutil integration for CFS and RT tasks
- Patches [10-11]: EAS's energy_compute() integration
- Patches [12-16]: Per task group (secondary) API

Newcomer's Short Abstract
=========================

The Linux scheduler tracks a "utilization" signal for each scheduling entity
(SE), e.g. tasks, to know how much CPU time they use. This signal allows the
scheduler to know how "big" a task is and, in principle, it can support
advanced task placement strategies by selecting the best CPU to run a task.
Some of these strategies are represented by the Energy Aware Scheduler [3].

When the schedutil cpufreq governor is in use, the utilization signal allows
the Linux scheduler to also drive frequency selection. The CPU utilization
signal, which represents the aggregated utilization of tasks scheduled on that
CPU, is used to select the frequency which best fits the workload generated by
the tasks.

The current translation of utilization values into a frequency selection is
simple: we go to max for RT tasks or to the minimum frequency which can
accommodate the utilization of DL+FAIR tasks.
However, utilisation values by themselves cannot convey the desired
power/performance behaviours of each task as intended by user-space.
As such they are not ideally suited for task placement decisions.

Task placement and frequency selection policies in the kernel can be improved
by taking into consideration hints coming from authorised user-space elements,
like for example the Android middleware or more generally any "System
Management Software" (SMS) framework.

Utilization clamping is a mechanism which allows to "clamp" (i.e. filter) the
utilization generated by RT and FAIR tasks within a range defined by user-space.
The clamped utilization value can then be used, for example, to enforce a
minimum and/or maximum frequency depending on which tasks are active on a CPU.

The main use-cases for utilization clamping are:

- boosting: better interactive response for small tasks which
are affecting the user experience.

Consider for example the case of a small control thread for an external
accelerator (e.g. GPU, DSP, other devices). Here, from the task utilization
the scheduler does not have a complete view of what the task's requirements
are and, if it's a small utilization task, it keeps selecting a more energy
efficient CPU, with smaller capacity and lower frequency, thus negatively
impacting the overall time required to complete task activations.

- capping: increase energy efficiency for background tasks not affecting the
user experience.

Since running on a lower capacity CPU at a lower frequency is more energy
efficient, when the completion time is not a main goal, then capping the
utilization considered for certain (maybe big) tasks can have positive
effects, both on energy consumption and thermal headroom.
This feature allows also to make RT tasks more energy friendly on mobile
systems where running them on high capacity CPUs and at the maximum
frequency is not required.

>From these two use-cases, it's worth noticing that frequency selection
biasing, introduced by patches 9 and 10 of this series, is just one possible
usage of utilization clamping. Another compelling extension of utilization
clamping is in helping the scheduler in macking tasks placement decisions.

Utilization is (also) a task specific property the scheduler uses to know
how much CPU bandwidth a task requires, at least as long as there is idle time.
Thus, the utilization clamp values, defined either per-task or per-task_group,
can represent tasks to the scheduler as being bigger (or smaller) than what
they actually are.

Utilization clamping thus enables interesting additional optimizations, for
example on asymmetric capacity systems like Arm big.LITTLE and DynamIQ CPUs,
where:

- boosting: try to run small/foreground tasks on higher-capacity CPUs to
complete them faster despite being less energy efficient.

- capping: try to run big/background tasks on low-capacity CPUs to save power
and thermal headroom for more important tasks

This series does not present this additional usage of utilization clamping but
it's an integral part of the EAS feature set, where [1] is one of its main
components.

Android kernels use SchedTune, a solution similar to utilization clamping, to
bias both 'frequency selection' and 'task placement'. This series provides the
foundation to add similar features to mainline while focusing, for the
time being, just on schedutil integration.

References
==========

[1] "Expressing per-task/per-cgroup performance hints"
Linux Plumbers Conference 2018
https://linuxplumbersconf.org/event/2/contributions/128/

[2] Message-ID: <20180911162827.GJ1100574@devbig004.ftw2.facebook.com>
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20180911162827.GJ1100574@devbig004.ftw2.facebook.com/

[3] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20181203095628.11858-1-quentin.perret@arm.com/

Patrick Bellasi (16):
sched/core: Allow sched_setattr() to use the current policy
sched/core: uclamp: Extend sched_setattr() to support utilization
clamping
sched/core: uclamp: Map TASK's clamp values into CPU's clamp buckets
sched/core: uclamp: Add CPU's clamp buckets refcounting
sched/core: uclamp: Update CPU's refcount on clamp changes
sched/core: uclamp: Enforce last task UCLAMP_MAX
sched/core: uclamp: Add system default clamps
sched/cpufreq: uclamp: Add utilization clamping for FAIR tasks
sched/cpufreq: uclamp: Add utilization clamping for RT tasks
sched/core: Add uclamp_util_with()
sched/fair: Add uclamp support to energy_compute()
sched/core: uclamp: Extend CPU's cgroup controller
sched/core: uclamp: Propagate parent clamps
sched/core: uclamp: Map TG's clamp values into CPU's clamp buckets
sched/core: uclamp: Use TG's clamps to restrict TASK's clamps
sched/core: uclamp: Update CPU's refcount on TG's clamp changes

Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst | 46 ++
include/linux/log2.h | 37 +
include/linux/sched.h | 87 +++
include/linux/sched/sysctl.h | 11 +
include/linux/sched/task.h | 6 +
include/linux/sched/topology.h | 6 -
include/uapi/linux/sched.h | 12 +-
include/uapi/linux/sched/types.h | 65 +-
init/Kconfig | 75 ++
init/init_task.c | 1 +
kernel/exit.c | 1 +
kernel/sched/core.c | 947 +++++++++++++++++++++++-
kernel/sched/cpufreq_schedutil.c | 46 +-
kernel/sched/fair.c | 41 +-
kernel/sched/rt.c | 4 +
kernel/sched/sched.h | 136 +++-
kernel/sysctl.c | 16 +
17 files changed, 1480 insertions(+), 57 deletions(-)

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2.19.2