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Date: Thu, 8 Sep 2011 10:16:51 -0700
From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
To: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Anton Blanchard <anton@au1.ibm.com>, Avi Kivity <avi@redhat.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>, Lai Jiangshan <laijs@cn.fujitsu.com>,
        Paul Menage <menage@google.com>,
        Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
        Tim Pepper <lnxninja@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 08/32] nohz: Move nohz load balancer selection into
 idle logic
Message-ID: <20110908171651.GI2671@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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On Thu, Sep 08, 2011 at 04:08:54PM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 04:45:17PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, 2011-08-15 at 17:52 +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > > We want the nohz load balancer to be an idle CPU, thus
> > > move that selection to strict dyntick idle logic.
> > 
> > Again, the important part is missing, why is this correct?
> > 
> > I'm not at all convinced this is correct, suppose all your cpus (except
> > the system CPU, which we'll assume has many tasks) are busy running 1
> > task. Then two of them get an extra task, now if those two happen to be
> > SMT siblings you want the load-balancer to pull on task out from the SMT
> > pair, however nobody is pulling since nobody is idle.
> > 
> > AFAICT this breaks stuff and the ILB needs some serious attention in
> > order to fix this.
> 
> Right, we have the support for trigger_load_balance() in scheduler_tick()
> that is still missing.
> 
> What about using that CPU that has to stay awake with a periodic tick
> to handle jiffies? We could force that CPU to be the idle load balancer.
> The problem is perhaps to find the right frequency for doing that because
> we have all the rq to handle.

If this CPU can also be the RCU grace-period advancer of last resort,
that would make it easier to arrive at an improved RCU_FAST_NO_HZ.

							Thanx, Paul