better wake-balancing: respin

[Chen, Kenneth W]

Once upon a time, this patch was in -mm tree (2.6.13-mm1):
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=112265450426975&w=2

It is neither in Linus's official tree, nor it is in -mm anymore.

I guess I missed the objection for dropping the patch.  I'm bringing
up this discussion again.  The wake-up path is a lot hotter on numa
system running database benchmark.  Even on a moderate 8P numa box,
__wake_up and try_to_wake_up is showing up as #1 and #4 hottest kernel
functions.  While on a comparable 4P smp box, these two functions are
#5 and #9 respectively.

I think situation will be worse on 32P numa box in the wake up path.
I don't have any measurement on 32P setup yet, because 8P numa
performance sucks at the moment and it is a blocker for us before
proceed any bigger setup.


Execution profile for 8P numa box [1]:

   Symbol              Clockticks Inst. Retired   L3 Misses
#1 __wake_up           8.08%      1.88%           4.67%
#2 finish_task_switch  7.53%      18.11%          5.82%
#3 __make_request      6.87%      2.09%           4.35%
#4 try_to_wake_up      5.57%      0.64%           3.10%



Execution profile for 4P SMP box [2]:

   Symbol              Clockticks
#5 __wake_up           3.57%
#9 try_to_wake_up      2.38%

My question is: what was the reason this patch is dropped and what
can we do to improve wake-up performance?  In my opinion, we should
simply put the task on the CPU it was previously ran and have
rebalance_tick and load_balance_newidle to balance out the load.

- Ken


[1] 8 processor: 1.6 GHz Itanium2 processor, 9M L3. 256 GB memory
[2] 4 processor: 1.6 GHz Itanium2 processor, 9M L3. 128 GB memory

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