Re: [PATCH 2/2] sched: Rewrite per entity runnable load average tracking

[bsegall]

Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 12:07:08PM -0700, bsegall@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>> 
>> > On Wed, Jul 09, 2014 at 09:07:53AM +0800, Yuyang Du wrote:
>> >> That is chalenging... Can someone (Peter) grant us a lock of the remote rq? :)
>> >
>> > Nope :-).. we got rid of that lock for a good reason.
>> >
>> > Also, this is one area where I feel performance really trumps
>> > correctness, we can fudge the blocked load a little. So the
>> > sched_clock_cpu() difference is a strict upper bound on the
>> > rq_clock_task() difference (and under 'normal' circumstances shouldn't
>> > be much off).
>> 
>> Well, unless IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING or such is on, in which case you lose.
>> Or am I misunderstanding the suggestion?
>
> If its on its still an upper bound, and typically the difference is not
> too large I think.
>
> Since clock_task is the regular clock minus some local amount, the
> difference between two regular clock reads is always a strict upper
> bound on clock_task differences.
>
>> Actually the simplest thing
>> would probably be to grab last_update_time (which on 32-bit could be
>> done with the _copy hack) and use that. Then I think the accuracy is
>> only worse than current in that you can lose runnable load as well as
>> blocked load, and that it isn't as easily corrected - currently if the
>> blocked tasks wake up they'll add the correct numbers to
>> runnable_load_avg, even if blocked_load_avg is screwed up and hit zero.
>> This code would have to wait until it stabilized again.
>
> The problem with that is that last_update_time is measured in
> clock_task, and you cannot transfer these values between CPUs.
> clock_task can drift unbounded between CPUs.

Yes, but we don't need to - we just use the remote last_update_time to
do a final update on p->se.avg, and then subtract that from cfs_rq->avg
with atomics (and then set p->se.avg.last_update_time to 0 as now). This
throws away any time since last_update_time, but that's no worse than
current, which throws away any time since decay_counter, and they're
both called from enqueue/dequeue/tick/update_blocked_averages.
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