sched/fair: Force balancing on NOHZ balance if local group has capacity
The "goto force_balance" here is intended to mitigate the fact that avg_load calculations can result in bad placement decisions when priority is asymmetrical. The original commit that adds it: fab47622 ("sched: Force balancing on newidle balance if local group has capacity") explains: Under certain situations, such as a niced down task (i.e. nice = -15) in the presence of nr_cpus NICE0 tasks, the niced task lands on a sched group and kicks away other tasks because of its large weight. This leads to sub-optimal utilization of the machine. Even though the sched group has capacity, it does not pull tasks because sds.this_load >> sds.max_load, and f_b_g() returns NULL. A similar but inverted issue also affects ARM big.LITTLE (asymmetrical CPU capacity) systems - consider 8 always-running, same-priority tasks on a system with 4 "big" and 4 "little" CPUs. Suppose that 5 of them end up on the "big" CPUs (which will be represented by one sched_group in the DIE sched_domain) and 3 on the "little" (the other sched_group in DIE), leaving one CPU unused. Because the "big" group has a higher group_capacity its avg_load may not present an imbalance that would cause migrating a task to the idle "little". The force_balance case here solves the problem but currently only for CPU_NEWLY_IDLE balances, which in theory might never happen on the unused CPU. Including CPU_IDLE in the force_balance case means there's an upper bound on the time before we can attempt to solve the underutilization: after DIE's sd->balance_interval has passed the next nohz balance kick will help us out. Signed-off-by: Brendan Jackman <brendan.jackman@arm.com> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de> Cc: Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com> Cc: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com> Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org> Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170807163900.25180-1-brendan.jackman@arm.comSigned-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
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