Re: [PATCH v4 1/2] x86/fpu: track AVX-512 usage of tasks

[Andi Kleen]

On Tue, Dec 11, 2018 at 09:18:25AM -0800, Dave Hansen wrote:
> On 12/10/18 4:24 PM, Aubrey Li wrote:
> > The tracking turns on the usage flag at the next context switch of
> > the task, but requires 3 consecutive context switches with no usage
> > to clear it. This decay is required because well-written AVX-512
> > applications are expected to clear this state when not actively using
> > AVX-512 registers.
> 
> One concern about this:  Given a HZ=1000 system, this means that the
> flag needs to get scanned every ~3ms.  That's a pretty good amount of
> scanning on a system with hundreds or thousands of tasks running around.
> 
> How many tasks does this scale to until you're eating up an entire CPU
> or two just scanning /proc?

Yes that's why we may need to propagate it to cgroups in the kernel,
because user daemons don't really want to track every TID.

But per pid is a start so that people can start experimenting with this.

Then with some experience fancier interfaces for it can be implemented.

-Andi