Re: [patch 15/16] sched: return unused runtime on voluntary sleep

Paul Turner
2011-06-28T18:46:30Z

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 3:01 AM, Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-06-27 at 18:42 -0700, Paul Turner wrote:
>
>> - The aesthetics of releasing rq->lock in the put path.  Quick
>> inspection suggests it should actually be safe to do at that point,
>> and we do similar for idle_balance().
>>
>> Given consideration the above two factors are not requirements, this
>> could be moved out of a timer and into the put_path directly (with the
>> fact that we drop rq->lock strongly commented).  I have no strong
>> preference between either choice.
>
> Argh, ok I see, distribute_cfs_runtime() wants that. Dropping rq->lock
> is very fragile esp from the put path, you can only do that _before_ the
> put path updates rq->curr etc.. So I'd rather you didn't, just keep the
> timer crap and add some comments there.
>

Done.

An alternative that does come to mind is something like:

- cfs_b->lock may be sufficient synchronization to twiddle
cfs_rq->runtime_assigned (once it has been throttled, modulo alb)
- we could use this to synchronize a per-rq "to-be-unthrottled" list
which could be checked under something like task_tick_fair

We'd have to be careful about making sure we wake-up a sleeping cpu
but this hides the rq->lock requirements and would let us kill the
timer.

Perhaps this could be a future incremental improvement.

> And we need that distribute_cfs_runtime() muck because that's what
> unthrottles rqs when more runtime is available.. bah.
>
>
>