Re: [PATCH] sched, fair: Allow a small degree of load imbalance between SD_NUMA domains v2

Vincent Guittot
2020-01-08T16:47:05Z

Le Wednesday 08 Jan 2020 à 14:03:49 (+0000), Mel Gorman a écrit :
> On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 02:18:58PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 07, 2020 at 08:24:06PM +0000, Mel Gorman wrote:
> > > Now I get you, but unfortunately it also would not work out. The number
> > > of groups is not related to the LLC except in some specific cases.
> > > It's possible to use the first CPU to find the size of an LLC but now I
> > > worry that it would lead to unpredictable behaviour. AMD has different
> > > numbers of LLCs per node depending on the CPU family and while Intel
> > > generally has one LLC per node, I imagine there are counter examples.
> >
> > Intel has the 'fun' case of an LLC spanning nodes :-), although Linux
> > pretends this isn't so and truncates the LLC topology information to be
> > the node again -- see arch/x86/kernel/smpboot.c:match_llc().
> >
>
> That's the Sub-NUMA Clustering, right? I thought that manifested as a
> separate NUMA node in Linux. Not exactly right from a topology point of
> view, but close enough. Still, you're right in that identifying the LLC
> specifically would not necessarily be the way to go. FWIW, I have one
> machine with SNC enabled and didn't notice anything problematic in the
> versions of the patch released to date.
>
> > And of course, in the Core2 era we had the Core2Quad chips which was a
> > dual-die solution and therefore also had multiple LLCs, and I think the
> > Xeon variant of that would allow the multiple LLC per node situation
> > too, although this is of course ancient hardware nobody really cares
> > about anymore.
> >
>
> Ok, even though they're older, it's enough counter-examples to be concerned
> about. I'm definitely dropping the LLC considerations for the moment :)
>
> > > This means that load balancing on different machines with similar core
> > > counts will behave differently due to the LLC size.
> >
> > That sounds like perfectly fine/expected behaviour to me.
> >
>
> Even so, I think it should not be part of the initial patch. I would only
> be happy if I had enough different machine types to prove that specific
> special casing is required and we cannot simply rely on standard load
> balancing of the domains below SD_NUMA.
>
> > > It might be possible
> > > to infer it if the intermediate domain was DIE instead of MC but I doubt
> > > that's guaranteed and it would still be unpredictable. It may be the type
> > > of complexity that should only be introduced with a separate patch with
> > > clear rationale as to why it's necessary and we are not at that threshold
> > > so I withdraw the suggestion.
> >
> > So IIRC the initial patch(es) had the idea to allow for 1 extra task
> > imbalance to get 1-1 pairs on the same node, instead of across nodes. I
> > don't immediately see that in these later patches.
> >
>
> Not quite -- I had a minimum allowed imbalance of 2 tasks -- mostly for
> very small NUMA domains. By v3, it was not necessary because the value
> was hard-coded regardless of the number of CPUs. I think I'll leave it
> out because I don't think it's worth worrying about the imbalance between
> NUMA domains of less than 4 CPUs (do they even exist any more?)
>
> > Would that be something to go back to? Would that not side-step much of
> > the issues under discussion here?
>
> Allowing just 1 extra task would work for netperf in some cases except when
> softirq is involved. It would partially work for IO on ext4 as it's only
> communicating with one journal thread but a bit more borderline for XFS
> due to workqueue usage. XFS is not a massive concern in this context as
> the workqueue is close to the IO issuer and short-lived so I don't think
> it would crop up much for load balancing unlike ext4 where jbd2 could be
> very active.
>
> If v4 of the patch fails to meet approval then I'll try a patch that

My main concern with v4 was the mismatch between the computed value and the goal to not overload the LLCs

> allows a hard-coded imbalance of 2 tasks (one communicating task and

If there is no good way to compute the allowed imbalance, a hard coded value of 2 is probably simple value to start with

> one kthread) regardless of NUMA domain span up to 50% of utilisation

Are you sure that it's necessary ? This degree of imbalance already applies only if the group has spare capacity

something like

+ /* Consider allowing a small imbalance between NUMA groups */
+ if (env->sd->flags & SD_NUMA) {
+
+ /*
+ * Until we found a good way to compute an acceptable
+ * degree of imbalance linked to the system topology
+ * and that will not impatc mem bandwith and latency,
+ * let start with a fixed small value.
+ */
+ imbalance_adj = 2;
+
+ /*
+ * Ignore small imbalances when the busiest group has
+ * low utilisation.
+ */
+ env->imbalance -= min(env->imbalance, imbalance_adj);
+ }

> and see what that gets. One way or the other, I would like to get basic
> NUMA balancing issue out of the way before even looking at NUMA balancing
> and whether it needs to be adjusted based on the load balancing rewrite.
> NUMA balancing already has some logic that fights load balancer decisions
> and I don't want to make that worse, I would be delighted if we could
> even delete that migration retry check that overrides the load balancer
> because it always was a bit nasty.
>
> --
> Mel Gorman
> SUSE Labs