Re: [RFC PATCH 4/4] sched: Upload nohz full CPU load on task enqueue/dequeue

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Wed Jan 20 2016 - 04:10:50 EST


On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 06:03:19PM +0100, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 02:17:08PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 05:01:31PM +0100, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > > The full nohz CPU load is currently accounted on tick restart only.
> > > But there are a few issues with this model:
> > >
> > > _ On tick restart, if cpu_load[0] doesn't contain the load of the actual
> > > tickless load that just ran, we are going to account a wrong value.
> > > And it is very likely to be so given that cpu_load[0] doesn't have
> > > an opportunity to be updated between tick stop and tick restart.
> > >
> > > _ If the runqueue had updates that didn't trigger a tick restart, we
> > > are going to miss those CPU load changes.
> > >
> > > A solution to fix this is to update the CPU load everytime we enqueue
> > > or dequeue a task in the fair runqueue and more than a jiffy occured
> > > since the last update.
> >
> > Would not a much better solution be to do this remotely instead of from
> > one of the hottest functions in the scheduler?
>
> The problem with doing this remotely is that we can miss past cpu loads if
> there was several enqueue/dequeue operations happening while tickless.

Its a timer based sample, it _always_ and per definition misses
intermediate state.

You can simply do:

for_each_nohzfull_cpu(cpu) {
struct rq *rq = rq_of(cpu);

raw_spin_lock(&rq->lock);
update_cpu_load_active(rq);
raw_spin_unlock(&rq->lock);
}

Also, since when can we have enqueues/dequeues while NOHZ_FULL ? I
thought that was the 1 task 100% cpu case, there are no
enqueues/dequeues there.