Re: [PATCH v2 7/9] sched: define TIF_ALLOW_RESCHED

Ingo Molnar
2023-09-19T09:50:02Z

* Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 18 2023 at 20:21, Andy Lutomirski wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 30, 2023, at 11:49 AM, Ankur Arora wrote:
>
> > Why do we support anything other than full preempt? I can think of
> > two reasons, neither of which I think is very good:
> >
> > 1. Once upon a time, tracking preempt state was expensive. But we fixed that.
> >
> > 2. Folklore suggests that there's a latency vs throughput tradeoff,
> > and serious workloads, for some definition of serious, want
> > throughput, so they should run without full preemption.
>
> It's absolutely not folklore. Run to completion is has well known
> benefits as it avoids contention and avoids the overhead of scheduling
> for a large amount of scenarios.
>
> We've seen that painfully in PREEMPT_RT before we came up with the
> concept of lazy preemption for throughput oriented tasks.

Yeah, for a large majority of workloads reduction in preemption increases
batching and improves cache locality. Most scalability-conscious enterprise
users want longer timeslices & better cache locality, not shorter
timeslices with spread out cache use.

There's microbenchmarks that fit mostly in cache that benefit if work is
immediately processed by freshly woken tasks - but that's not true for most
workloads with a substantial real-life cache footprint.

Thanks,

Ingo