Re: SD_LOAD_BALANCE

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Mon Oct 12 2020 - 07:21:39 EST


On Sat, Oct 10, 2020 at 06:14:23PM +0200, Julia Lawall wrote:
> Prior to v5.8 on my machine this was a rare event, because there were not
> many of these background processes. But in v5.8, the default governor for
> Intel machines without the HWP feature was changed from intel_pstate to
> intel_cpufreq. The use of intel_cpufreq triggers very frequent kworkers on
> all cores, which makes it much more likely that cores that are currently
> idle, and are overall not at all overloaded, will have a higher load
> average even with the waking thread deducted, than the core managing the
> wakeup of the threads.

Rafael, any idea what those kworkers are for, and can we get rid of
them?