Re: [PATCH v3 09/12] Revert "sched: Put rq's sched_avg under CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED"

[Morten Rasmussen]

On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 09:12:38PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 11, 2014 at 07:39:29PM +0200, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > In my mind, arch_scale_cpu_freq was intend to scale the capacity of
> > the CPU according to the current dvfs operating point.
> > As it's no more use anywhere now that we have arch_scale_cpu, we could
> > probably remove it .. and see when it will become used.
> 
> I probably should have written comments when I wrote that code, but it
> was meant to be used only where, as described above, we limit things.
> Ondemand and such, which will temporarily decrease freq, will ramp it up
> again at demand, and therefore lowering the capacity will skew things.
> 
> You'll put less load on because its run slower, and then you'll run it
> slower because there's less load on -> cyclic FAIL.

Agreed. We can't use a frequency scaled compute capacity for all
load-balancing decisions. However, IMHO, it would be useful to have know
the current compute capacity in addition to the max compute capacity
when considering energy costs. So we would have something like:

* capacity_max: cpu capacity at highest frequency.

* capacity_cur: cpu capacity at current frequency.

* capacity_avail: cpu capacity currently available. Basically
  capacity_cur taking rt, deadline, and irq accounting into account.

capacity_max should probably include rt, deadline, and irq accounting as
well. Or we need both?

Based on your description arch_scale_freq_capacity() can't be abused to
implement capacity_cur (and capacity_avail) unless it is repurposed.
Nobody seems to implement it. Otherwise we would need something similar
to update capacity_cur (and capacity_avail). 

As a side note, we can potentially get into a similar fail cycle already
due to the lack of scale invariance in the entity load tracking.

> 
> > > In that same discussion ISTR a suggestion about adding avg_running time,
> > > as opposed to the current avg_runnable. The sum of avg_running should be
> > > much more accurate, and still react correctly to migrations.
> > 
> > I haven't look in details but I agree that avg_running would be much
> > more accurate than avg_runnable and should probably fit the
> > requirement. Does it means that we could re-add the avg_running (or
> > something similar) that has disappeared during the review of load avg
> > tracking patchset ?
> 
> Sure, I think we killed it there because there wasn't an actual use for
> it and I'm always in favour of stripping everything to their bare bones,
> esp big and complex things.
> 
> And then later, add things back once we have need for it.

I think it is a useful addition to the set of utilization metrics. I
don't think it is universally more accurate than runnable_avg. Actually
quite the opposite when the cpu is overloaded. But for partially loaded
cpus it is very useful if you don't want to factor in waiting time on
the rq.

Morten
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