Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] introduce sched-idle balancing

[Abel Wu]

Hi Peter,

On 2/24/22 11:20 PM, Peter Zijlstra Wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 17, 2022 at 11:43:56PM +0800, Abel Wu wrote:
> > Current load balancing is mainly based on cpu capacity
> > and task util, which makes sense in the POV of overall
> > throughput. While there still might be some improvement
> > can be done by reducing number of overloaded cfs rqs if
> > sched-idle or idle rq exists.
>
> I'm much confused, there is an explicit new-idle balancer and a periodic
> idle balancer already there.

The two balancers are triggered on the rqs that have no tasks on them,
and load_balance() seems don't show a preference for non-idle tasks so
there might be possibility that only idle tasks are pulled during load
balance while overloaded rqs (rq->cfs.h_nr_running > 1) exist. As a
result the normal tasks, mostly latency-critical ones in our case, on
that overloaded rq still suffer waiting for each other. I observed this
through perf sched.

IOW the main difference from the POV of load_balance() between the
latency-critical tasks and the idle ones is load.

The sched-idle balancer is triggered on the sched-idle rqs periodically
and the newly-idle ones. It does a 'fast' pull of non-idle tasks from
the overloaded rqs to the sched-idle/idle ones to let the non-idle tasks
make full use of cpu resources.

The sched-idle balancer only focuses on non-idle tasks' performance, so
it can introduce overall load imbalance, and that's why I put it before
load_balance().

Best Regards,
	Abel