[PATCH v3 2/2] sched/fair: Choose the CPU where short task is running during wake up
From: Chen Yu
Date: Thu Dec 01 2022 - 03:44:36 EST
[Problem Statement]
For a workload that is doing frequent context switches, the throughput
scales well until the number of instances reaches a peak point. After
that peak point, the throughput drops significantly if the number of
instances continues to increase.
The will-it-scale context_switch1 test case exposes the issue. The
test platform has 112 CPUs per LLC domain. The will-it-scale launches
1, 8, 16 ... 112 instances respectively. Each instance is composed
of 2 tasks, and each pair of tasks would do ping-pong scheduling via
pipe_read() and pipe_write(). No task is bound to any CPU.
It is found that, once the number of instances is higher than
56(112 tasks in total, every CPU has 1 task), the throughput
drops accordingly if the instance number continues to increase:
^
throughput|
| X
| X X X
| X X X
| X X
| X X
| X
| X
| X
| X
|
+-----------------.------------------->
56
number of instances
[Symptom analysis]
The performance downgrading was caused by a high system idle
percentage(around 20% ~ 30%). The CPUs waste a lot of time in
idle and do nothing. As a comparison, if set CPU affinity to
these workloads and stops them from migrating among CPUs,
the idle percentage drops to nearly 0%, and the throughput
increases by about 300%. This indicates room for optimization.
The reason for the high idle percentage is different before/after
commit f3dd3f674555 ("sched: Remove the limitation of WF_ON_CPU
on wakelist if wakee cpu is idle").
[Before the commit]
The bottleneck is the runqueue spinlock.
nr_instance rq lock percentage
1 1.22%
8 1.17%
16 1.20%
24 1.22%
32 1.46%
40 1.61%
48 1.63%
56 1.65%
--------------------------
64 3.77% |
72 5.90% | increase
80 7.95% |
88 9.98% v
96 11.81%
104 13.54%
112 15.13%
And top 2 rq lock hot paths:
(path1):
raw_spin_rq_lock_nested.constprop.0;
try_to_wake_up;
default_wake_function;
autoremove_wake_function;
__wake_up_common;
__wake_up_common_lock;
__wake_up_sync_key;
pipe_write;
new_sync_write;
vfs_write;
ksys_write;
__x64_sys_write;
do_syscall_64;
entry_SYSCALL_64_after_hwframe;write
(path2):
raw_spin_rq_lock_nested.constprop.0;
__sched_text_start;
schedule_idle;
do_idle;
cpu_startup_entry;
start_secondary;
secondary_startup_64_no_verify
task A tries to wake up task B on CPU1, then task A grabs the
runqueue lock of CPU1. If CPU1 is about to quit idle, it needs
to grab its lock which has been taken by someone else. Then
CPU1 takes more time to quit which hurts the performance.
[After the commit]
The cause is the race condition between select_task_rq() and
the task enqueue.
Suppose there are nr_cpus pairs of ping-pong scheduling
tasks. For example, p0' and p0 are ping-pong scheduling,
so do p1' <=> p1, and p2'<=> p2. None of these tasks are
bound to any CPUs. The problem can be summarized as:
more than 1 wakers are stacked on 1 CPU, which slows down
waking up their wakees:
CPU0 CPU1 CPU2
p0' p1' => idle p2'
try_to_wake_up(p0) try_to_wake_up(p2);
CPU1 = select_task_rq(p0); CPU1 = select_task_rq(p2);
ttwu_queue(p0, CPU1); ttwu_queue(p2, CPU1);
__ttwu_queue_wakelist(p0, CPU1); => ttwu_list->p0
quiting cpuidle_idle_call()
ttwu_list->p2->p0 <= __ttwu_queue_wakelist(p2, CPU1);
WRITE_ONCE(CPU1->ttwu_pending, 1); WRITE_ONCE(CPU1->ttwu_pending, 1);
p0' => idle
sched_ttwu_pending()
enqueue_task(p2 and p0)
idle => p2
...
p2 time slice expires
...
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
<=== !!! p2 delays the wake up of p0' !!!
!!! causes long idle on CPU0 !!!
p2 => p0 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
p0 wakes up p0'
idle => p0'
Since there are many waker/wakee pairs in the system, the chain reaction
causes many CPUs to be victims. These idle CPUs wait for their waker to
be scheduled.
Actually Tiancheng has mentioned above issue here[2].
[Proposal]
The root cause is that there is no strict synchronization of select_task_rq()
and the set of ttwu_pending flag among several CPUs. And this might be by
design because the scheduler prefers parallel wakeup.
So avoid this problem indirectly. If a system does not have idle cores,
and if the waker and wakee are both short duration tasks, wake up the wakee on
the same CPU as waker.
The reason is that, if the waker is a short-duration task, it might
relinquish the CPU soon, and the wakee has the chance to be scheduled.
On the other hand, if the wakee is a short duration task, putting it on
non-idle CPU would bring minimal impact to the running task. No idle
core in the system indicates that this mechanism should not inhibit
spreading the tasks if the system have idle core.
[Benchmark results]
The baseline is v6.1-rc6. The test platform has 56 Cores(112 CPUs) per
LLC domain. C-states deeper than C1E are disabled. Turbo is disabled.
CPU frequency governor is performance.
will-it-scale.context_switch1
=============================
+331.13%
hackbench
=========
case load baseline(std%) compare%( std%)
process-pipe 1 group 1.00 ( 1.50) +0.83 ( 0.19)
process-pipe 2 groups 1.00 ( 0.77) +0.82 ( 0.52)
process-pipe 4 groups 1.00 ( 0.20) -2.07 ( 2.91)
process-pipe 8 groups 1.00 ( 0.05) +3.48 ( 0.06)
process-sockets 1 group 1.00 ( 2.90) -11.20 ( 11.99)
process-sockets 2 groups 1.00 ( 5.42) -1.39 ( 1.70)
process-sockets 4 groups 1.00 ( 0.17) -0.20 ( 0.19)
process-sockets 8 groups 1.00 ( 0.03) -0.05 ( 0.11)
threads-pipe 1 group 1.00 ( 2.09) -1.63 ( 0.44)
threads-pipe 2 groups 1.00 ( 0.28) -0.21 ( 1.48)
threads-pipe 4 groups 1.00 ( 0.27) +0.13 ( 0.63)
threads-pipe 8 groups 1.00 ( 0.14) +5.04 ( 0.04)
threads-sockets 1 group 1.00 ( 2.51) -1.86 ( 2.08)
threads-sockets 2 groups 1.00 ( 1.24) -0.60 ( 3.83)
threads-sockets 4 groups 1.00 ( 0.49) +0.07 ( 0.46)
threads-sockets 8 groups 1.00 ( 0.09) -0.04 ( 0.08)
netperf
=======
case load baseline(std%) compare%( std%)
TCP_RR 28 threads 1.00 ( 0.81) -0.13 ( 0.80)
TCP_RR 56 threads 1.00 ( 0.55) +0.03 ( 0.64)
TCP_RR 84 threads 1.00 ( 0.33) +1.74 ( 0.31)
TCP_RR 112 threads 1.00 ( 0.24) +3.71 ( 0.23)
TCP_RR 140 threads 1.00 ( 0.21) +215.10 ( 12.37)
TCP_RR 168 threads 1.00 ( 61.97) +86.15 ( 12.26)
TCP_RR 196 threads 1.00 ( 14.49) +0.71 ( 14.20)
TCP_RR 224 threads 1.00 ( 9.54) +0.68 ( 7.00)
UDP_RR 28 threads 1.00 ( 1.51) +0.25 ( 1.02)
UDP_RR 56 threads 1.00 ( 7.90) +0.57 ( 7.89)
UDP_RR 84 threads 1.00 ( 6.38) +3.66 ( 20.77)
UDP_RR 112 threads 1.00 ( 10.15) +3.16 ( 11.87)
UDP_RR 140 threads 1.00 ( 9.98) +164.29 ( 12.55)
UDP_RR 168 threads 1.00 ( 10.72) +174.41 ( 17.05)
UDP_RR 196 threads 1.00 ( 18.84) +3.92 ( 15.48)
UDP_RR 224 threads 1.00 ( 16.97) +2.98 ( 16.69)
tbench
======
case load baseline(std%) compare%( std%)
loopback 28 threads 1.00 ( 0.12) -0.38 ( 0.35)
loopback 56 threads 1.00 ( 0.17) -0.04 ( 0.19)
loopback 84 threads 1.00 ( 0.03) +0.95 ( 0.07)
loopback 112 threads 1.00 ( 0.03) +162.42 ( 0.05)
loopback 140 threads 1.00 ( 0.14) -2.26 ( 0.14)
loopback 168 threads 1.00 ( 0.49) -2.15 ( 0.54)
loopback 196 threads 1.00 ( 0.06) -2.38 ( 0.22)
loopback 224 threads 1.00 ( 0.20) -1.95 ( 0.30)
schbench
========
case load baseline(std%) compare%( std%)
normal 1 mthread 1.00 ( 1.46) +1.03 ( 0.00)
normal 2 mthreads 1.00 ( 3.82) -5.41 ( 8.37)
normal 4 mthreads 1.00 ( 1.03) +5.11 ( 2.88)
normal 8 mthreads 1.00 ( 2.96) -2.41 ( 0.93)
In summary, overall there is no significant performance regression detected
and there is a big improvement in netperf/tbench in partially-busy cases.
[Limitations]
As Peter said, the criteria of a short duration task is intuitive, but it
seems to be hard to find an accurate criterion to describe this.
This wake up strategy can be viewed as dynamic WF_SYNC. Except that:
1. Some workloads do not have WF_SYNC set.
2. WF_SYNC does not treat non-idle CPU as candidate target CPU.
Peter has suggested[1] comparing task duration with the cost of searching
for an idle CPU. If the latter is higher, then give up the scan, to
achieve better task affine. However, this method does not fit in the case
encountered in this patch. Because there are plenty of idle CPUs in the system,
it will not take too long to find an idle CPU. The bottleneck is caused by the
race condition mentioned above.
[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/Y2O8a%2FOhk1i1l8ao@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/9ed75cad-3718-356f-21ca-1b8ec601f335@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/
Suggested-by: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx>
Suggested-by: K Prateek Nayak <kprateek.nayak@xxxxxxx>
Tested-by: kernel test robot <yujie.liu@xxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Chen Yu <yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx>
---
kernel/sched/fair.c | 10 ++++++++++
1 file changed, 10 insertions(+)
diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c
index a4b314b664f8..3f7361ec1330 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/fair.c
+++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c
@@ -6246,6 +6246,11 @@ wake_affine_idle(int this_cpu, int prev_cpu, int sync)
if (available_idle_cpu(prev_cpu))
return prev_cpu;
+ /* The only running task is a short duration one. */
+ if (cpu_rq(this_cpu)->nr_running == 1 &&
+ is_short_task((struct task_struct *)cpu_curr(this_cpu)))
+ return this_cpu;
+
return nr_cpumask_bits;
}
@@ -6612,6 +6617,11 @@ static int select_idle_cpu(struct task_struct *p, struct sched_domain *sd, bool
time = cpu_clock(this);
}
+ if (!has_idle_core && cpu_rq(target)->nr_running == 1 &&
+ is_short_task((struct task_struct *)cpu_curr(target)) &&
+ is_short_task(p))
+ return target;
+
if (sched_feat(SIS_UTIL)) {
sd_share = rcu_dereference(per_cpu(sd_llc_shared, target));
if (sd_share) {
--
2.25.1