Re: [PATCH] sched/fair: Make sched-idle cpu selection consistent throughout

[Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2019 at 02:42:03PM +0530, Viresh Kumar wrote:
> On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 at 22:17, Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> wrote:
> 
> > As the patch stands, I think a fork-intensive workload where each
> > process is doing small amounts of work will suffer from overloading
> > domains and have variable performance depending on how quickly the load
> > balancer reacts.
> 
> Just wanted to clarify this slightly in case it is confusing. Once a
> newly forked
> (non SCHED_IDLE) task gets placed on a sched-idle CPU, it won't remain
> sched-idle anymore and we will again start looking for a fully idle CPU. So,
> we won't put everything on a small set of CPUs, but just one SCHED_NORMAL
> task on a CPU unless we are out of idle CPUs.
> 
> Do you have some specific test in mind which I can run to test this ?
> 

Nothing in particular. git test suite for the basic fork-intensive case
(mmtests config workload-shellscripts), something fork-intensive but
relatively short-lived like a kernel build scaling the number of build
jobs (mmtests config config-workload-kerndevel), something fairly basic
that scales number of running jobs and relatively long-lived like tbench
(mmtests config config-network-tbench). The ideal of course is that you
wrote the patch based on an observed problem that you decided to fix.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs