Re: [PATCH 2/5] cgroup/cpuset: Add new cpus.partition type with no load balancing

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Thu Jun 10 2021 - 14:51:41 EST


On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 05:24:13PM -0400, Waiman Long wrote:
> Cpuset v1 uses the sched_load_balance control file to determine if load
> balancing should be enabled. Cpuset v2 gets rid of sched_load_balance
> as its use may require disabling load balancing at cgroup root.
>
> For workloads that require very low latency like DPDK, the latency
> jitters caused by periodic load balancing may exceed the desired
> latency limit.
>
> When cpuset v2 is in use, the only way to avoid this latency cost is to
> use the "isolcpus=" kernel boot option to isolate a set of CPUs. After
> the kernel boot, however, there is no way to add or remove CPUs from
> this isolated set. For workloads that are more dynamic in nature, that
> means users have to provision enough CPUs for the worst case situation
> resulting in excess idle CPUs.
>
> To address this issue for cpuset v2, a new cpuset.cpus.partition type
> "root-nolb" is added which allows the creation of a cpuset partition with
> no load balancing. This will allow system administrators to dynamically
> adjust the size of the no load balancing partition to the current need
> of the workload without rebooting the system.

I'm confused, why do you need this? Just create a parition for each cpu.