Re: [PATCH] sched: watchdog: Touch kernel watchdog in sched code

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Fri, Mar 06, 2020 at 02:34:20PM -0800, Xi Wang wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 6, 2020 at 12:40 AM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 05, 2020 at 02:11:49PM -0800, Paul Turner wrote:
> > > The goal is to improve jitter since we're constantly periodically
> > > preempting other classes to run the watchdog.   Even on a single CPU
> > > this is measurable as jitter in the us range.  But, what increases the
> > > motivation is this disruption has been recently magnified by CPU
> > > "gifts" which require evicting the whole core when one of the siblings
> > > schedules one of these watchdog threads.
> > >
> > > The majority outcome being asserted here is that we could actually
> > > exercise pick_next_task if required -- there are other potential
> > > things this will catch, but they are much more braindead generally
> > > speaking (e.g. a bug in pick_next_task itself).
> >
> > I still utterly hate what the patch does though; there is no way I'll
> > have watchdog code hook in the scheduler like this. That's just asking
> > for trouble.
> >
> > Why isn't it sufficient to sample the existing context switch counters
> > from the watchdog? And why can't we fix that?
> 
> We could go to pick next and repick the same task. There won't be a
> context switch but we still want to hold the watchdog. I assume such a
> counter also needs to be per cpu and inside the rq lock. There doesn't
> seem to be an existing one that fits this purpose.

Sorry, your reply got lost, but I just ran into something that reminded
me of this.

There's sched_count. That's currently schedstat, but if you can find a
spot in a hot cacheline (from schedule()'s perspective) then it
should be cheap to incremenent unconditionally.

If only someone were to write a useful cacheline perf tool (and no that
c2c trainwreck doesn't count).