[PATCH v7 0/2] sched/fair: Introduce SIS_CURRENT to wake up short task on current CPU

From: Chen Yu
Date: Fri Apr 21 2023 - 04:11:56 EST


The main purpose is to avoid too many cross CPU wake up when it is
unnecessary. The frequent cross CPU wakeup brings significant damage
to some workloads, especially on high core count systems:
1. The cross CPU wakeup triggers race condition that, some wakers are
stacked on 1 CPU which delays the wakeup of their wakees.
2. The cross CPU wakeup brings c2c overhead if the waker and wakee share
cache resource.

Inhibits the cross CPU wake-up by placing the wakee on waking CPU,
if both the waker and wakee are short-duration tasks, and when the
waker and wakee wake up each other.

The first patch introduces the definition of a short-duration task.
The second patch leverages the first patch to choose a local CPU for wakee.

Overall there is performance improvement when the benchmark has
close 1:1 waker/wakee relationship, such as will-it-scale, netperf, tbench.
And for netperf, it has a universal performance improvement under many
different utilization. And there is no noticeable impact on schbench, hackbench,
or a OLTP workload with a commercial RDBMS, according to the test on
Intel Sapphire Rapids, which has 2 x 56C/112T = 224 CPUs.

Per the lastest test on Zen3 from Prateek, tbench/netperf shows good
improvement at 128 clients, SPECjbb2015 shows improvement in max-jOPS.


Changes since v6:
1. Rename SIS_SHORT to SIS_CURRENT, which better describes this feature.
2. Remove the 50% utilization threshold. Removes the has_idle_cores check.
After this change, SIS_CURRENT is applicable to all system utilization.
3. Add a condition that only waker and wakee wake up each other would enable
the SIS_CURRENT. That is, A->last_wakee = B and B->last_wakee = A.

Changes since v5:
1. Check the wakee_flips of the waker/wakee. If the wakee_flips
of waker/wakee are both 0, it indicates that the waker and the wakee
are waking up each other. In this case, put them together on the
same CPU. This is to avoid that too many wakees are stacked on
one CPU, which might cause regression on redis.

Changes since v4:
1. Dietmar has commented on the task duration calculation. So refined
the commit log to reduce confusion.
2. Change [PATCH 1/2] to only record the average duration of a task.
So this change could benefit UTIL_EST_FASTER[1].
3. As v4 reported regression on Zen3 and Kunpeng Arm64, add back
the system average utilization restriction that, if the system
is not busy, do not enable the short wake up. Above logic has
shown improvment on Zen3[2].
4. Restrict the wakeup target to be current CPU, rather than both
current CPU and task's previous CPU. This could also benefit
wakeup optimization from interrupt in the future, which is
suggested by Yicong.

Changes since v3:
1. Honglei and Josh have concern that the threshold of short
task duration could be too long. Decreased the threshold from
sysctl_sched_min_granularity to (sysctl_sched_min_granularity / 8),
and the '8' comes from get_update_sysctl_factor().
2. Export p->se.dur_avg to /proc/{pid}/sched per Yicong's suggestion.
3. Move the calculation of average duration from put_prev_task_fair()
to dequeue_task_fair(). Because there is an issue in v3 that,
put_prev_task_fair() will not be invoked by pick_next_task_fair()
in fast path, thus the dur_avg could not be updated timely.
4. Fix the comment in PATCH 2/2, that "WRITE_ONCE(CPU1->ttwu_pending, 1);"
on CPU0 is earlier than CPU1 getting "ttwu_list->p0", per Tianchen.
5. Move the scan for CPU with short duration task from select_idle_cpu()
to select_idle_siblings(), because there is no CPU scan involved, per
Yicong.

Changes since v2:

1. Peter suggested comparing the duration of waker and the cost to
scan for an idle CPU: If the cost is higher than the task duration,
do not waste time finding an idle CPU, choose the local or previous
CPU directly. A prototype was created based on this suggestion.
However, according to the test result, this prototype does not inhibit
the cross CPU wakeup and did not bring improvement. Because the cost
to find an idle CPU is small in the problematic scenario. The root
cause of the problem is a race condition between scanning for an idle
CPU and task enqueue(please refer to the commit log in PATCH 2/2).
So v3 does not change the core logic of v2, with some refinement based
on Peter's suggestion.

2. Simplify the logic to record the task duration per Peter and Abel's suggestion.


[1] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/c56855a7-14fd-4737-fc8b-8ea21487c5f6@xxxxxxx/
[2] https://lore.kernel.org/all/cover.1666531576.git.yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/

v6: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1677069490.git.yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/
v5: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1675361144.git.yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/
v4: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1671158588.git.yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/
v3: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/cover.1669862147.git.yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/
v2: https://lore.kernel.org/all/cover.1666531576.git.yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/
v1: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220915165407.1776363-1-yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx/

Chen Yu (2):
sched/fair: Record the average duration of a task
sched/fair: Introduce SIS_CURRENT to wake up short task on current CPU

include/linux/sched.h | 3 +++
kernel/sched/core.c | 2 ++
kernel/sched/debug.c | 1 +
kernel/sched/fair.c | 59 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
kernel/sched/features.h | 1 +
5 files changed, 66 insertions(+)

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2.25.1