Re: [BUG] schedutil governor produces regular max freq spikes because of lockup detector watchdog threads

Juri Lelli
2018-01-10T10:58:47Z

On 09/01/18 16:50, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 3:43 PM, Leonard Crestez <leonard.crestez@nxp.com> wrote:

[...]

> > Every 4 seconds (really it's /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_thresh * 2 / 5
> > and watchdog_thresh defaults to 10). There is a per-cpu hrtimer which
> > wakes the per-cpu thread in order to check that tasks can still
> > execute, this works very well against bugs like infinite loops in
> > softirq mode. The timers are synchronized initially but can get
> > staggered (for example by hotplug).
> >
> > My guess is that it's only marked RT so that it executes ahead of other
> > threads and the watchdog doesn't trigger simply when there are lots of
> > userspace tasks.
>
> I think so too.
>
> I see a couple of more-or-less hackish ways to avoid the issue, but
> nothing particularly attractive ATM.
>
> I wouldn't change the general behavior with respect to RT tasks
> because of this, though, as we would quickly find a case in which that
> would turn out to be not desirable.

I agree we cannot generalize to all RT tasks, but what Patrick proposed
(clamping utilization of certain known tasks) might help here:

lkml.kernel.org/r/20170824180857.32103-1-patrick.bellasi@arm.com

Maybe with a per-task interface instead of using cgroups?

The other option would be to relax DL tasks affinity constraints, so
that a case like this might be handled. Daniel and Tommaso proposed
possible approaches, this might be a driving use case. Not sure how we
would come up with a proper runtime for the watchdog, though.

Best,

- Juri