Re: vmstat: On demand vmstat workers V4

Christoph Lameter
2014-05-09T15:34:15Z

On Fri, 9 May 2014, Thomas Gleixner wrote:

> > Ok how do I figure out that cpu? I'd rather have a specific cpu that
> > never changes.
>
> I followed the full nohz development only losely, but back then when
> all started here at my place with frederic, we had a way to define the
> housekeeper cpu. I think we lazily had it hardwired to 0 :)

Yes that would be the easiest and simplest. We dedicate cpu 0 to OS
services around
here anyways.

> That probably changed, but I'm sure there is still a way to define a
> housekeeper. And we should simply force the timekeeping on that
> housekeeper. That comes with the price, that the housekeeper is not
> allowed to go deep idle, but I bet that in HPC scenarios this does not
> matter at all simply because the whole machine is under full load.

Excellent. Yes. Good.

> >
> > The vmstat kworker thread checks every 2 seconds if there are vmstat
> > updates that need to be folded into the global statistics. This is not
> > necessary if the application is running and no OS services are being used.
> > Thus we could switch off vmstat updates and avoid taking the processor
> > away from the application.
> >
> > This has also been noted by multiple other people at was brought up at the
> > mm summit by others who noted the same issues.
>
> I understand why you want to get this done by a housekeeper, I just
> did not understand why we need this whole move it around business is
> required.

This came about because of another objection against having it simply
fixed to a processor. After all that processor may be disabled etc etc.