Re: RT sched: cpupri_vec lock contention with def_root_domain and no load balance

Gregory Haskins
2008-11-04T14:30:53Z

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Gregory Haskins wrote:
> Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 15:07 -0600, Dimitri Sivanich wrote:
>>
>>
>>> When load balancing gets switched off for a set of cpus via the
>>> sched_load_balance flag in cpusets, those cpus wind up with the
>>> globally defined def_root_domain attached. The def_root_domain is
>>> attached when partition_sched_domains calls detach_destroy_domains().
>>> A new root_domain is never allocated or attached as a sched domain
>>> will never be attached by __build_sched_domains() for the non-load
>>> balanced processors.
>>>
>>> The problem with this scenario is that on systems with a large number
>>> of processors with load balancing switched off, we start to see the
>>> cpupri->pri_to_cpu->lock in the def_root_domain becoming contended.
>>> This starts to become much more apparent above 8 waking RT threads
>>> (with each RT thread running on it's own cpu, blocking and waking up
>>> continuously).
>>>
>>> I'm wondering if this is, in fact, the way things were meant to work,
>>> or should we have a root domain allocated for each cpu that is not to
>>> be part of a sched domain? Note the the def_root_domain spans all of
>>> the non-load-balanced cpus in this case. Having it attached to cpus
>>> that should not be load balancing doesn't quite make sense to me.
>>>
>>>
>> It shouldn't be like that, each load-balance domain (in your case a
>> single cpu) should get its own root domain. Gregory?
>>
>>
>
> Yeah, this sounds broken. I know that the root-domain code was being
> developed coincident to some upheaval with the cpuset code, so I suspect
> something may have been broken from the original intent. I will take a
> look.
>
> -Greg
>
>

After thinking about it some more, I am not quite sure what to do here.
The root-domain code was really designed to be 1:1 with a disjoint
cpuset. In this case, it sounds like all the non-balanced cpus are
still in one default cpuset. In that case, the code is correct to place
all those cores in the singleton def_root_domain. The question really
is: How do we support the sched_load_balance flag better?

I suppose we could go through the scheduler code and have it check that
flag before consulting the root-domain. Another alternative is to have
the sched_load_balance=false flag create a disjoint cpuset. Any thoughts?

-Greg

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