Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] drm: commit_work scheduling

[Rob Clark]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2020 at 3:36 AM Qais Yousef <qais.yousef@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 10/06/20 13:04, Rob Clark wrote:
> > On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 3:59 AM Qais Yousef <qais.yousef@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On 10/05/20 16:24, Rob Clark wrote:
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > > > RT planning and partitioning is not easy task for sure. You might want to
> > > > > consider using affinities too to get stronger guarantees for some tasks and
> > > > > prevent cross-talking.
> > > >
> > > > There is some cgroup stuff that is pinning SF and some other stuff to
> > > > the small cores, fwiw.. I think the reasoning is that they shouldn't
> > > > be doing anything heavy enough to need the big cores.
> > >
> > > Ah, so you're on big.LITTLE type of system. I have done some work which enables
> > > biasing RT tasks towards big cores and control the default boost value if you
> > > have util_clamp and schedutil enabled. You can use util_clamp in general to
> > > help with DVFS related response time delays.
> > >
> > > I haven't done any work to try our best to pick a small core first but fallback
> > > to big if there's no other alternative.
> > >
> > > It'd be interesting to know how often you end up on a big core if you remove
> > > the affinity. The RT scheduler picks the first cpu in the lowest priority mask.
> > > So it should have this bias towards picking smaller cores first if they're
> > > in the lower priority mask (ie: not running higher priority RT tasks).
> >
> > fwiw, the issue I'm looking at is actually at the opposite end of the
> > spectrum, less demanding apps that let cpus throttle down to low
> > OPPs.. which stretches out the time taken at each step in the path
> > towards screen (which seems to improve the odds that we hit priority
> > inversion scenarios with SCHED_FIFO things stomping on important CFS
> > things)
>
> So you do have the problem of RT task preempting an important CFS task.
>
> >
> > There is a *big* difference in # of cpu cycles per frame between
> > highest and lowest OPP..
>
> To combat DVFS related delays, you can use util clamp.
>
> Hopefully this article helps explain it if you didn't come across it before
>
>         https://lwn.net/Articles/762043/
>
> You can use sched_setattr() to set SCHED_FLAG_UTIL_CLAMP_MIN for a task. This
> will guarantee everytime this task is running it'll appear it has at least
> this utilization value, so schedutil governor (which must be used for this to
> work) will pick up the right performance point (OPP).
>
> The scheduler will try its best to make sure that the task will run on a core
> that meets the minimum requested performance point (hinted by setting
> uclamp_min).

Yeah, I think we will end up making some use of uclamp.. there is
someone else working on that angle

But without it, this is a case that exposes legit prioritization
problems with commit_work which we should fix ;-)

BR,
-R

>
> Thanks
>
> --
> Qais Yousef