Re: [RFC PATCH] arm64: defconfig: Disable fine-grained task level IRQ time accounting

[Valentin Schneider]

On 03/08/20 20:22, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> Valentin,
>
> Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@xxxxxxx> writes:
>> On 03/08/20 16:13, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
>>> Vladimir Oltean <olteanv@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
>>>>>  1) When irq accounting is disabled, RT throttling kicks in as
>>>>>     expected.
>>>>>
>>>>>  2) With irq accounting the RT throttler does not kick in and the RCU
>>>>>     stall/lockups happen.
>>>> What is this telling us?
>>>
>>> It seems that the fine grained irq time accounting affects the runtime
>>> accounting in some way which I haven't figured out yet.
>>>
>>
>> With IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING, rq_clock_task() will always be incremented by a
>> lesser-or-equal value than when not having the option; you start with the
>> same delta_exec but slice some for the IRQ accounting, and leave the rest
>> for the rq_clock_task() (+paravirt).
>>
>> IIUC this means that if you spend e.g. 10% of the time in IRQ and 90% of
>> the time running the stress-ng RT tasks, despite having RT tasks hogging
>> the entirety of the "available time" it is still only 90% runtime, which is
>> below the 95% default and the throttling doesn't happen.
>
>    totaltime = irqtime + tasktime
>
> Ignoring irqtime and pretending that totaltime is what the scheduler
> can control and deal with is naive at best.
>

Agreed, however AFAICT rt_time is only incremented by rq_clock_task()
deltas, which don't include IRQ time with IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y. That would
then be directly compared to the sysctl runtime.

Adding some prints in sched_rt_runtime_exceeded() and running this test
case on my Juno, I get:

  # IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y
  cpu=2 rt_time=713455220 runtime=950000000 rq->avg_irq.util_avg=265
  (rt_time oscillates between [70.1e7, 75.1e7]; avg_irq between [220, 270])

  # IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=n
  cpu=2 rt_time=963035300 runtime=949951811
  (rt_time oscillates between [94.1e7, 96.1e7];

Throttling happens for IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=n and doesn't for
IRQ_TIME_ACCOUNTING=y - clearly the accounted rt_time isn't high enough for
that to happen, and it does look like what is missing in rt_time (or what
should be subtracted from the available runtime) is there in the avg_irq.

Or is that another case where I shouldn't have been writing emails at this
hour?

> Thanks,
>
>         tglx