Re: CPU scheduler weirdness?

Peter Zijlstra
2009-08-19T07:04:16Z

On Tue, 2009-08-18 at 21:49 +0200, Marton Balint wrote:

> In the meantime, I was able to create a tiny C program which always
> succesfully reproduces the bug. It's basically an endless loop which does
> not stop while the process is running on the last CPU core. The program
> creates multiple instances of itself, to be able to keep all of the CPU
> cores busy. After 1 second, the processes running on other than the last
> CPU core die, the processes running on the last CPU core remain stuck
> there...
>
> I tested it on my dual core system, if someone could test it on a quad
> core and report back that would probably be useful.
>
> Usage: ./schedtest <number of CPU cores>
>
> And don't forget to kill the stuck processes after using the program! :)

So what's the bug? Sure one task will stay on the cpu, and because there
is no contention it doesn't get migrated, and therefore won't quit,
how's that a problem?

If you start a bunch of loops (enough to fill all cpus) you'll find
it'll get migrated and die pretty quickly.

Those same loops `while :; do :; done &` get spread around the available
cores just fine, still no bug.

btw: sysconf(_SC_NPROCESSORS_ONLN);