[PATCH] sched: SMT niceness handling
From: Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org> This patch provides full per-package priority support for SMT processors (aka pentium4 hyperthreading) when combined with CONFIG_SCHED_SMT. It maintains cpu percentage distribution within each physical cpu package by limiting the time a lower priority task can run on a sibling cpu concurrently with a higher priority task. It introduces a new flag into the scheduler domain unsigned int per_cpu_gain; /* CPU % gained by adding domain cpus */ This is empirically set to 15% for pentium4 at the moment and can be modified to support different values dynamically as newer processors come out with improved SMT performance. It should not matter how many siblings there are. How it works is it compares tasks running on sibling cpus and when a lower static priority task is running it will delay it till high_priority_timeslice * (100 - per_cpu_gain) / 100 <= low_prio_timeslice eg. a nice 19 task timeslice is 10ms and nice 0 timeslice is 102ms On vanilla the nice 0 task runs on one logical cpu while the nice 19 task runs unabated on the other logical cpu. With smtnice the nice 0 runs on one logical cpu for 102ms and the nice 19 sleeps till the nice 0 task has 12ms remaining and then will schedule. Real time tasks and kernel threads are not altered by this code, and kernel threads do not delay lower priority user tasks. with lots of thanks to Zwane Mwaikambo and Nick Piggin for help with the coding of this version. If this is merged, it is probably best to delay pushing this upstream in mainline till sched_domains gets tested for at least one major release.
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