Re: [PATCH] sched/rt: Do not pull from current CPU if only one cpu to pull

[Steven Rostedt]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 10:07:57 +0100
Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On 04/12/17 03:09, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> > On Mon, 4 Dec 2017 08:45:17 +0100
> > Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >   
> > > Right. I was wondering however if for the truly UP case we shouldn't be
> > > initiating/queueing callbacks (pull/push) at all?  
> > 
> > If !CONFIG_SMP then it's not compiled in. The issue came up when Daniel
> > ran a CONFIG_SMP kernel on an arch that only supports UP.
> >   
> 
> Right, sorry. I meant num_online_cpus() == 1.
>

Correct. But we need to disable the push/pull when CPUs go down to 1,
or if we see "num_possible_cpus() == 1" at boot up. It woulld need
to be re-enabled when CPUs are onlined and count goes greater than
one. Which we could also add, and I started going that route first. My
first patch had that check at each push/pull, but num_online_cpus() is
a weight of the cpumask, and for machines with more than 64 CPUs,
calculating that number becomes a bigger task and we want to keep that
out of the scheduler fast path, which push/pull logic happens to be in.

When looking at changing this code, I realized that rt_overloaded()
returns the count of overloaded CPUs, and the check to see if the
current CPU is overloaded is a single bit check of a cpumask (all very
quick). This not only fixes the issue with what Daniel found, but also
can help in certain cases on large CPU count machines.

-- Steve