Tim Chen wrote:Ah, I was looking at the original smpnice patch. Thanks for clarifying.Peter,
If there is no load on this_cpu, (i.e. tl_per_task is 0), we will fail the "tl + target_load(cpu, idx) <= tl_per_task" check.
This isn't the case. If this_cpu is idle tl_per_task will be set to SCHED_LOAD_SCALE (see implementation of cpu_avg_load_per_task()) and that expression should succeed unless the value returned by target_load(cpu, idx) is bigger than SCHED_LOAD_SCALE. This is exactly the same as would have happened with the original code.
(BTW cpu_avg_load_per_task()'s original implementation would have had the effect you describe but it was modified when it was realized that it would break the code in a lot of places (not just here). The thinking now is that if there isn't enough data available to calculate the average load per task for a run queue then the correct value to use is the theoretical average i.e. SCHED_LOAD_SCALE.)