Re: [RFC] scheduler: improve SMP fairness in CFS

From: Chris Friesen
Date: Tue Jul 24 2007 - 15:48:18 EST


Chris Snook wrote:

Concerns aside, I agree that fairness is important, and I'd really like to see a test case that demonstrates the problem.

One place that might be useful is the case of fairness between resource groups, where the load balancer needs to consider each group separately.

Now it may be the case that trying to keep the load of each class within X% of the other cpus is sufficient, but it's not trivial.

Consider the case where you have a resource group that is allocated 50% of each cpu in a dual cpu system, and only have a single task in that group. This means that in order to make use of the full group allocation, that task needs to be load-balanced to the other cpu as soon as it gets scheduled out. Most load-balancers can't handle that kind of granularity, but I have guys in our engineering team that would really like this level of performance.

We currently use CKRM on an SMP machine, but the only way we can get away with it is because our main app is affined to one cpu and just about everything else is affined to the other.

We have another SMP box that would benefit from group scheduling, but we can't use it because the load balancer is not nearly good enough.

Chris
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