Re: CFS scheduler unfairly prefers pinned tasks

From: Wanpeng Li
Date: Sat Oct 10 2015 - 03:59:00 EST


On 10/10/15 11:59 AM, Wanpeng Li wrote:
Hi Paul,
On 10/8/15 4:19 PM, Mike Galbraith wrote:
On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 04:45 +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote:
On Tue, 2015-10-06 at 08:48 +1100, paul.szabo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
The Linux CFS scheduler prefers pinned tasks and unfairly
gives more CPU time to tasks that have set CPU affinity.
This effect is observed with or without CGROUP controls.

To demonstrate: on an otherwise idle machine, as some user
run several processes pinned to each CPU, one for each CPU
(as many as CPUs present in the system) e.g. for a quad-core
non-HyperThreaded machine:

taskset -c 0 perl -e 'while(1){1}' &
taskset -c 1 perl -e 'while(1){1}' &
taskset -c 2 perl -e 'while(1){1}' &
taskset -c 3 perl -e 'while(1){1}' &

and (as that same or some other user) run some without
pinning:

perl -e 'while(1){1}' &
perl -e 'while(1){1}' &

and use e.g. top to observe that the pinned processes get
more CPU time than "fair".

Interesting, I can reproduce it w/ your simple script. However, they are fair when the number of pinned perl tasks is equal to unpinned perl tasks. I will dig into it more deeply.

For the pinned tasks, when set the task affinity to all the available cpus instead of the separate cpu as in your test, there is fair between pinned tasks and unpinned tasks. So I suspect that if it is the overhead associated with migration stuff.

Regards,
Wanpeng Li

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