Re: [PATCH] sched/fair: handle case of task_h_load() returning 0

[Vincent Guittot]

On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 18:28, Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 18:11, Valentin Schneider
> <valentin.schneider@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 02/07/20 15:42, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > > task_h_load() can return 0 in some situations like running stress-ng
> > > mmapfork, which forks thousands of threads, in a sched group on a 224 cores
> > > system. The load balance doesn't handle this correctly because
> > > env->imbalance never decreases and it will stop pulling tasks only after
> > > reaching loop_max, which can be equal to the number of running tasks of
> > > the cfs. Make sure that imbalance will be decreased by at least 1.
> > >
> > > misfit task is the other feature that doesn't handle correctly such
> > > situation although it's probably more difficult to face the problem
> > > because of the smaller number of CPUs and running tasks on heterogenous
> > > system.
> > >
> > > We can't simply ensure that task_h_load() returns at least one because it
> > > would imply to handle underrun in other places.
> >
> > Nasty one, that...
> >
> > Random thought: isn't that the kind of thing we have scale_load() and
> > scale_load_down() for? There's more uses of task_h_load() than I would like
> > for this, but if we upscale its output (or introduce an upscaled variant),
> > we could do something like:
> >
> > ---
> > detach_tasks()
> > {
> >         long imbalance = env->imbalance;
> >
> >         if (env->migration_type == migrate_load)
> >                 imbalance = scale_load(imbalance);
> >
> >         while (!list_empty(tasks)) {
> >                 /* ... */
> >                 switch (env->migration_type) {
> >                 case migrate_load:
> >                         load = task_h_load_upscaled(p);
> >                         /* ... usual bits here ...*/
> >                         lsub_positive(&env->imbalance, load);
> >                         break;
> >                         /* ... */
> >                 }
> >
> >                 if (!scale_load_down(env->imbalance))
> >                         break;
> >         }
> > }
> > ---
> >
> > It's not perfect, and there's still the misfit situation to sort out -
> > still, do you think this is something we could go towards?
>
> This will not work for 32bits system.
>
> For 64bits, I have to think a bit more if the upscale would fix all
> cases and support propagation across a hierarchy. And in this case we
> could also consider to make scale_load/scale_load_down a nop all the
> time

In addition that problem remains on 32bits, the problem can still
happen after extending the scale so this current patch still makes
sense.

Then if we want to reduce the cases where task_h_load returns 0, we
should better make scale_load_down a nop otherwise we will have to
maintain 2 values h_load and scale_h_load across the hierarchy

>
> >
> > >
> > > Signed-off-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > > ---
> > >  kernel/sched/fair.c | 18 +++++++++++++++++-
> > >  1 file changed, 17 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> > >
> > > diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c
> > > index 6fab1d17c575..62747c24aa9e 100644
> > > --- a/kernel/sched/fair.c
> > > +++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c
> > > @@ -4049,7 +4049,13 @@ static inline void update_misfit_status(struct task_struct *p, struct rq *rq)
> > >               return;
> > >       }
> > >
> > > -     rq->misfit_task_load = task_h_load(p);
> > > +     /*
> > > +      * Make sure that misfit_task_load will not be null even if
> > > +      * task_h_load() returns 0. misfit_task_load is only used to select
> > > +      * rq with highest load so adding 1 will not modify the result
> > > +      * of the comparison.
> > > +      */
> > > +     rq->misfit_task_load = task_h_load(p) + 1;
> > >  }
> > >
> > >  #else /* CONFIG_SMP */
> > > @@ -7664,6 +7670,16 @@ static int detach_tasks(struct lb_env *env)
> > >                           env->sd->nr_balance_failed <= env->sd->cache_nice_tries)
> > >                               goto next;
> > >
> > > +                     /*
> > > +                      * Depending of the number of CPUs and tasks and the
> > > +                      * cgroup hierarchy, task_h_load() can return a null
> > > +                      * value. Make sure that env->imbalance decreases
> > > +                      * otherwise detach_tasks() will stop only after
> > > +                      * detaching up to loop_max tasks.
> > > +                      */
> > > +                     if (!load)
> > > +                             load = 1;
> > > +
> > >                       env->imbalance -= load;
> > >                       break;