[PATCH v2 0/3] newidle_balance() PREEMPT_RT latency mitigations

From: Scott Wood
Date: Wed Apr 28 2021 - 19:28:32 EST


These patches mitigate latency caused by newidle_balance() on large
systems when PREEMPT_RT is enabled, by enabling interrupts when the lock
is dropped, and exiting early at various points if an RT task is runnable
on the current CPU.

On a system with 128 CPUs, these patches dropped latency (as measured by
a 12 hour rteval run) from 1045us to 317us (when applied to
5.12.0-rc3-rt3).

I tried a couple scheduler benchmarks (perf bench sched pipe, and
sysbench threads) to try to determine whether the overhead is measurable
on non-RT, but the results varied widely enough (with or without the patches)
that I couldn't draw any conclusions from them. So at least for now, I
limited the balance callback change to when PREEMPT_RT is enabled.

Link to v1 RFC patches:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200428050242.17717-1-swood@xxxxxxxxxx/

Scott Wood (3):
sched/fair: Call newidle_balance() from balance_callback on PREEMPT_RT
sched/fair: Enable interrupts when dropping lock in newidle_balance()
sched/fair: break out of newidle balancing if an RT task appears

kernel/sched/fair.c | 66 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
kernel/sched/sched.h | 6 ++++
2 files changed, 64 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)

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2.27.0