Re: [PATCH 1/4] sched: Don't account tickless CPU load on tick

[Frederic Weisbecker]

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 02:08:57PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 05:01:28PM +0100, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > The cpu load update on tick doesn't care about dynticks and as such is
> > buggy when occuring on nohz ticks (including idle ticks) as it resets
> > the jiffies snapshot that was recorded on nohz entry. We eventually
> > ignore the potentially long tickless load that happened before the
> > tick.
> 
> I don't get it, how can we call scheduler_tick() while
> tick_nohz_tick_stopped() ?

tick_nohz_tick_stopped() (which is ts->tick_stopped == 1) doesn't actually
mean that the tick is really stopped. It just means that the tick fires only
when it's really needed (timer list expired, RCU stuff, irq_work, ...). So
if you're lucky, the tick is really stopped because there is nothing that needs
the tick in the future, otherwise (and it's probably most of the time) there is
some tick that may well be programmed some time ahead in the future.

So that's the kind of tick that can break the accounting of a whole long tickless
load that just ran.