[PATCH AUTOSEL 5.4 46/57] sched/fair: Ignore percpu threads for imbalance pulls

Sasha Levin
2021-05-03T16:57:11Z

From: Lingutla Chandrasekhar <clingutla@codeaurora.org>

[ Upstream commit 9bcb959d05eeb564dfc9cac13a59843a4fb2edf2 ]

During load balance, LBF_SOME_PINNED will be set if any candidate task
cannot be detached due to CPU affinity constraints. This can result in
setting env->sd->parent->sgc->group_imbalance, which can lead to a group
being classified as group_imbalanced (rather than any of the other, lower
group_type) when balancing at a higher level.

In workloads involving a single task per CPU, LBF_SOME_PINNED can often be
set due to per-CPU kthreads being the only other runnable tasks on any
given rq. This results in changing the group classification during
load-balance at higher levels when in reality there is nothing that can be
done for this affinity constraint: per-CPU kthreads, as the name implies,
don't get to move around (modulo hotplug shenanigans).

It's not as clear for userspace tasks - a task could be in an N-CPU cpuset
with N-1 offline CPUs, making it an "accidental" per-CPU task rather than
an intended one. KTHREAD_IS_PER_CPU gives us an indisputable signal which
we can leverage here to not set LBF_SOME_PINNED.

Note that the aforementioned classification to group_imbalance (when
nothing can be done) is especially problematic on big.LITTLE systems, which
have a topology the likes of:

DIE [ ]
MC [ ][ ]
0 1 2 3
L L B B

arch_scale_cpu_capacity(L) < arch_scale_cpu_capacity(B)

Here, setting LBF_SOME_PINNED due to a per-CPU kthread when balancing at MC
level on CPUs [0-1] will subsequently prevent CPUs [2-3] from classifying
the [0-1] group as group_misfit_task when balancing at DIE level. Thus, if
CPUs [0-1] are running CPU-bound (misfit) tasks, ill-timed per-CPU kthreads
can significantly delay the upgmigration of said misfit tasks. Systems
relying on ASYM_PACKING are likely to face similar issues.

Signed-off-by: Lingutla Chandrasekhar <clingutla@codeaurora.org>
[Use kthread_is_per_cpu() rather than p->nr_cpus_allowed]
[Reword changelog]
Signed-off-by: Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210407220628.3798191-2-valentin.schneider@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
---
kernel/sched/fair.c | 4 ++++
1 file changed, 4 insertions(+)

diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c
index 611adca1e6d0..93ab546b6e16 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/fair.c
+++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c
@@ -7300,6 +7300,10 @@ int can_migrate_task(struct task_struct *p, struct lb_env *env)
if (throttled_lb_pair(task_group(p), env->src_cpu, env->dst_cpu))
return 0;

+ /* Disregard pcpu kthreads; they are where they need to be. */
+ if ((p->flags & PF_KTHREAD) && kthread_is_per_cpu(p))
+ return 0;
+
if (!cpumask_test_cpu(env->dst_cpu, p->cpus_ptr)) {
int cpu;

--
2.30.2