tjh.dev/kernel at v6.6-rc2

should_we_balance() is called in load_balance() to find out if the CPU that
is trying to do the load balance is the right one or not.

With commit:

b1bfeab9b002("sched/fair: Consider the idle state of the whole core for load balance")

the code tries to find an idle core to do the load balancing
and falls back on an idle sibling CPU if there is no idle core.

However, on larger SMT systems, it could be needlessly iterating to find a
idle by scanning all the CPUs in an non-idle core. If the core is not idle,
and first SMT sibling which is idle has been found, then its not needed to
check other SMT siblings for idleness

Lets say in SMT4, Core0 has 0,2,4,6 and CPU0 is BUSY and rest are IDLE.
balancing domain is MC/DIE. CPU2 will be set as the first idle_smt and
same process would be repeated for CPU4 and CPU6 but this is unnecessary.
Since calling is_core_idle loops through all CPU's in the SMT mask, effect
is multiplied by weight of smt_mask. For example,when say 1 CPU is busy,
we would skip loop for 2 CPU's and skip iterating over 8CPU's. That
effect would be more in DIE/NUMA domain where there are more cores.

Testing and performance evaluation
==================================

The test has been done on this system which has 12 cores, i.e 24 small
cores with SMT=4:

lscpu
Architecture: ppc64le
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 96
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-95
Model name: POWER10 (architected), altivec supported
Thread(s) per core: 8

Used funclatency bcc tool to evaluate the time taken by should_we_balance(). For
base tip/sched/core the time taken is collected by making the
should_we_balance() noinline. time is in nanoseconds. The values are
collected by running the funclatency tracer for 60 seconds. values are
average of 3 such runs. This represents the expected reduced time with
patch.

tip/sched/core was at commit:

2f88c8e802c8 ("sched/eevdf/doc: Modify the documented knob to base_slice_ns as well")

Results:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
workload tip/sched/core with_patch(%gain)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
idle system 809.3 695.0(16.45)
stress ng – 12 threads -l 100 1013.5 893.1(13.49)
stress ng – 24 threads -l 100 1073.5 980.0(9.54)
stress ng – 48 threads -l 100 683.0 641.0(6.55)
stress ng – 96 threads -l 100 2421.0 2300(5.26)
stress ng – 96 threads -l 15 375.5 377.5(-0.53)
stress ng – 96 threads -l 25 635.5 637.5(-0.31)
stress ng – 96 threads -l 35 934.0 891.0(4.83)

Ran schbench(old), hackbench and stress_ng to evaluate the workload
performance between tip/sched/core and with patch.
No modification to tip/sched/core

TL;DR:

Good improvement is seen with schbench. when hackbench and stress_ng
runs for longer good improvement is seen.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
schbench(old) tip +patch(%gain)
10 iterations sched/core
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 Threads
50.0th: 8.00 9.00(-12.50)
75.0th: 9.60 9.00(6.25)
90.0th: 11.80 10.20(13.56)
95.0th: 12.60 10.40(17.46)
99.0th: 13.60 11.90(12.50)
99.5th: 14.10 12.60(10.64)
99.9th: 15.90 14.60(8.18)
2 Threads
50.0th: 9.90 9.20(7.07)
75.0th: 12.60 10.10(19.84)
90.0th: 15.50 12.00(22.58)
95.0th: 17.70 14.00(20.90)
99.0th: 21.20 16.90(20.28)
99.5th: 22.60 17.50(22.57)
99.9th: 30.40 19.40(36.18)
4 Threads
50.0th: 12.50 10.60(15.20)
75.0th: 15.30 12.00(21.57)
90.0th: 18.60 14.10(24.19)
95.0th: 21.30 16.20(23.94)
99.0th: 26.00 20.70(20.38)
99.5th: 27.60 22.50(18.48)
99.9th: 33.90 31.40(7.37)
8 Threads
50.0th: 16.30 14.30(12.27)
75.0th: 20.20 17.40(13.86)
90.0th: 24.50 21.90(10.61)
95.0th: 27.30 24.70(9.52)
99.0th: 35.00 31.20(10.86)
99.5th: 46.40 33.30(28.23)
99.9th: 89.30 57.50(35.61)
16 Threads
50.0th: 22.70 20.70(8.81)
75.0th: 30.10 27.40(8.97)
90.0th: 36.00 32.80(8.89)
95.0th: 39.60 36.40(8.08)
99.0th: 49.20 44.10(10.37)
99.5th: 64.90 50.50(22.19)
99.9th: 143.50 100.60(29.90)
32 Threads
50.0th: 34.60 35.50(-2.60)
75.0th: 48.20 50.50(-4.77)
90.0th: 59.20 62.40(-5.41)
95.0th: 65.20 69.00(-5.83)
99.0th: 80.40 83.80(-4.23)
99.5th: 102.10 98.90(3.13)
99.9th: 727.10 506.80(30.30)

schbench does improve in general. There is some run to run variation with
schbench. Did a validation run to confirm that trend is similar.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
hackbench tip +patch(%gain)
20 iterations, 50000 loops sched/core
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Process 10 groups : 11.74 11.70(0.34)
Process 20 groups : 22.73 22.69(0.18)
Process 30 groups : 33.39 33.40(-0.03)
Process 40 groups : 43.73 43.61(0.27)
Process 50 groups : 53.82 54.35(-0.98)
Process 60 groups : 64.16 65.29(-1.76)
thread 10 Time : 12.81 12.79(0.16)
thread 20 Time : 24.63 24.47(0.65)
Process(Pipe) 10 Time : 6.40 6.34(0.94)
Process(Pipe) 20 Time : 10.62 10.63(-0.09)
Process(Pipe) 30 Time : 15.09 14.84(1.66)
Process(Pipe) 40 Time : 19.42 19.01(2.11)
Process(Pipe) 50 Time : 24.04 23.34(2.91)
Process(Pipe) 60 Time : 28.94 27.51(4.94)
thread(Pipe) 10 Time : 6.96 6.87(1.29)
thread(Pipe) 20 Time : 11.74 11.73(0.09)

hackbench shows slight improvement with pipe. Slight degradation in process.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
stress_ng tip +patch(%gain)
10 iterations 100000 cpu_ops sched/core
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--cpu=96 -util=100 Time taken : 5.30, 5.01(5.47)
--cpu=48 -util=100 Time taken : 7.94, 6.73(15.24)
--cpu=24 -util=100 Time taken : 11.67, 8.75(25.02)
--cpu=12 -util=100 Time taken : 15.71, 15.02(4.39)
--cpu=96 -util=10 Time taken : 22.71, 22.19(2.29)
--cpu=96 -util=20 Time taken : 12.14, 12.37(-1.89)
--cpu=96 -util=30 Time taken : 8.76, 8.86(-1.14)
--cpu=96 -util=40 Time taken : 7.13, 7.14(-0.14)
--cpu=96 -util=50 Time taken : 6.10, 6.13(-0.49)
--cpu=96 -util=60 Time taken : 5.42, 5.41(0.18)
--cpu=96 -util=70 Time taken : 4.94, 4.94(0.00)
--cpu=96 -util=80 Time taken : 4.56, 4.53(0.66)
--cpu=96 -util=90 Time taken : 4.27, 4.26(0.23)

Good improvement seen with 24 CPUs. In this case only one CPU is busy,
and no core is idle. Decent improvement with 100% utilization case. no
difference in other utilization.

Fixes: b1bfeab9b002 ("sched/fair: Consider the idle state of the whole core for load balance")
Signed-off-by: Shrikanth Hegde <sshegde@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230902081204.232218-1-sshegde@linux.vnet.ibm.com

f8858d96

Shrikanth Hegde

2 years ago

x86/ibt: Suppress spurious ENDBR

25e73b7e

Peter Zijlstra

2 years ago

branches 2

master 9 hours ago default

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v6.19-rc4

1 week ago latest

README

Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.

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