Nikos Chantziaras and Jens Axboe reported that turning off
NEW_FAIR_SLEEPERS improves desktop interactivity visibly.
Nikos described his experiences the following way:
" With this setting, I can do "nice -n 19 make -j20" and
still have a very smooth desktop and watch a movie at
the same time. Various other annoyances (like the
"logout/shutdown/restart" dialog of KDE not appearing
at all until the background fade-out effect has finished)
are also gone. So this seems to be the single most
important setting that vastly improves desktop behavior,
at least here. "
Jens described it the following way, referring to a 10-seconds
xmodmap scheduling delay he was trying to debug:
" Then I tried switching NO_NEW_FAIR_SLEEPERS on, and then
I get:
Performance counter stats for 'xmodmap .xmodmap-carl':
9.009137 task-clock-msecs # 0.447 CPUs
18 context-switches # 0.002 M/sec
1 CPU-migrations # 0.000 M/sec
315 page-faults # 0.035 M/sec
0.020167093 seconds time elapsed
Woot! "
So disable it for now. In perf trace output i can see weird
delta timestamps:
cc1-9943 [001] 2802.059479616: sched_stat_wait: task: as:9944 wait: 2801938766276 [ns]
That nsec field is not supposed to be that large. More digging
is needed - but lets turn it off while the real bug is found.
Reported-by: Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>
Tested-by: Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@arcor.de>
Reported-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Tested-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
LKML-Reference: <4AA93D34.8040500@arcor.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Prefer tasks that wake other tasks to preempt quickly. This improves
performance because more work is available sooner.
The workload that prompted this patch was a kernel build over NFS4 (for some
curious and not understood reason we had to revert commit:
18de973530 to make any progress at all)
Without this patch a make -j8 bzImage (of x86-64 defconfig) would take
3m30-ish, with this patch we're down to 2m50-ish.
psql-sysbench/mysql-sysbench show a slight improvement in peak performance as
well, tbench and vmark seemed to not care.
It is possible to improve upon the build time (to 2m20-ish) but that seriously
destroys other benchmarks (just shows that there's more room for tinkering).
Much thanks to Mike who put in a lot of effort to benchmark things and proved
a worthy opponent with a competing patch.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Change mutex contention behaviour such that it will sometimes busy wait on
acquisition - moving its behaviour closer to that of spinlocks.
This concept got ported to mainline from the -rt tree, where it was originally
implemented for rtmutexes by Steven Rostedt, based on work by Gregory Haskins.
Testing with Ingo's test-mutex application (http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/1/8/50)
gave a 345% boost for VFS scalability on my testbox:
# ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
avg ops/sec: 296604
# ./test-mutex-shm V 16 10 | grep "^avg ops"
avg ops/sec: 85870
The key criteria for the busy wait is that the lock owner has to be running on
a (different) cpu. The idea is that as long as the owner is running, there is a
fair chance it'll release the lock soon, and thus we'll be better off spinning
instead of blocking/scheduling.
Since regular mutexes (as opposed to rtmutexes) do not atomically track the
owner, we add the owner in a non-atomic fashion and deal with the races in
the slowpath.
Furthermore, to ease the testing of the performance impact of this new code,
there is means to disable this behaviour runtime (without having to reboot
the system), when scheduler debugging is enabled (CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y),
by issuing the following command:
# echo NO_OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features
This command re-enables spinning again (this is also the default):
# echo OWNER_SPIN > /debug/sched_features
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Impact: improve/change/fix wakeup-buddy scheduling
Currently we only have a forward looking buddy, that is, we prefer to
schedule to the task we last woke up, under the presumption that its
going to consume the data we just produced, and therefore will have
cache hot benefits.
This allows co-waking producer/consumer task pairs to run ahead of the
pack for a little while, keeping their cache warm. Without this, we
would interleave all pairs, utterly trashing the cache.
This patch introduces a backward looking buddy, that is, suppose that
in the above scenario, the consumer preempts the producer before it
can go to sleep, we will therefore miss the wakeup from consumer to
producer (its already running, after all), breaking the cycle and
reverting to the cache-trashing interleaved schedule pattern.
The backward buddy will try to schedule back to the task that woke us
up in case the forward buddy is not available, under the assumption
that the last task will be the one with the most cache hot task around
barring current.
This will basically allow a task to continue after it got preempted.
In order to avoid starvation, we allow either buddy to get wakeup_gran
ahead of the pack.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
David Miller reported that hrtick update overhead has tripled the
wakeup overhead on Sparc64.
That is too much - disable the HRTICK feature for now by default,
until a faster implementation is found.
Reported-by: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Lin Ming reported a 10% OLTP regression against 2.6.27-rc4.
The difference seems to come from different preemption agressiveness,
which affects the cache footprint of the workload and its effective
cache trashing.
Aggresively preempt a task if its avg overlap is very small, this should
avoid the task going to sleep and find it still running when we schedule
back to it - saving a wakeup.
Reported-by: Lin Ming <ming.m.lin@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Yanmin reported a significant regression on his 16-core machine due to:
commit 93b75217df
Author: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Date: Fri Jun 27 13:41:33 2008 +0200
Flip back to the old behaviour.
Reported-by: "Zhang, Yanmin" <yanmin_zhang@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Measurement shows that the difference between cgroup:/ and cgroup:/foo
wake_affine() results is that the latter succeeds significantly more.
Therefore bias the calculations towards failing the test.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
We found that the affine wakeup code needs rather accurate load figures
to be effective. The trouble is that updating the load figures is fairly
expensive with group scheduling. Therefore ratelimit the updating.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
The bias given by source/target_load functions can be very large, disable
it by default to get faster convergence.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
calc_delta_asym() is supposed to do the same as calc_delta_fair() except
linearly shrink the result for negative nice processes - this causes them
to have a smaller preemption threshold so that they are more easily preempted.
The problem is that for task groups se->load.weight is the per cpu share of
the actual task group weight; take that into account.
Also provide a debug switch to disable the asymmetry (which I still don't
like - but it does greatly benefit some workloads)
This would explain the interactivity issues reported against group scheduling.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <vatsa@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
provide a text based interface to the scheduler features; this saves the
'user' from setting bits using decimal arithmetic.
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
