Re: [PATCH v2] sched: Don't try to catch up excess steal time.

Suleiman Souhlal
2024-09-25T16:29:02Z

On Wed, Sep 25, 2024 at 04:34:57PM +0100, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Wed, 2024-09-25 at 15:15 +0000, Suleiman Souhlal wrote:
> > Yes, that's a good way to put it: The excess steal time isn't actually
> > being stolen from anyone.
> > And since it's not being stolen from anyone, isn't the right thing to do
> > to drop it?
>
> It's being stolen from the system, isn't it? Just not any specific
> userspace process?

I guess it depends what you mean by "stolen". I would argue that it's not
stolen from anyone since the time isn't actually counted anywhere.

>
> If we have separate "end of outgoing task" and "start of incoming task"
> timestamps, surely the time between those two must be accounted
> *somewhere*?

Not exactly. clock_task is essentially frozen until the next
update_rq_clock(), at which point we'll look at how much sched_clock_cpu
advanced and subtract how much steal time advanced. The two things
are done in separate spots (update_rq_clock() and update_rq_clock_task()),
indepedently (which is where the race is happening).
As far as I can tell, the time between the two isn't really accounted
anywhere.

The "end of outgoing task" and "start of incoming task" timestamps should
end up being the same.

>
> > There might still be extra steal time that doesn't exceed the current
> > 'delta' from the race between reading the two values, that would still
> > be erroneously accounted to the outgoing task, which this patch doesn't
> > address, but we know that any steal > delta is from this race and should
> > be dropped.
>
> Well that's what we want the atomic paired read for :)

Right, but I don't think it's that simple. We aren't only reading memory
but also a clock.
It might be possible to address this with a mechanism like rseq, but that
would be a much bigger patch set than the current one (and I don't think
anyone has ever attempted to do rseq for VMs yet).

(There is also another potential issue I spotted with steal time, that
has to do with reading another VCPU's steal time while it's not running,
but I'll start a separate discussion about that with a different patch set.)

Thanks for the discussion.
-- Suleiman