• Ingo Molnar's avatar
    [PATCH] sched-2.5.64-bk10-C4 · 51d38a67
    Ingo Molnar authored
    This fixes a fundamental (and long-standing) bug in the sleep-average
    estimator which is the root cause of the "contest process_load" problems
    reported by Mike Galbraith and Andrew Morton, and which problem is
    addressed by Mike's patch.
    
    The bug is the following: the sleep_time code in activate_task()
    over-estimates the true sleep time by 0.5 jiffies on average (0.5 msecs
    on recent 2.5 kernels).  Furthermore, for highly context-switch
    intensive and CPU-intensive workloads it means a constant 1 jiffy
    over-estimation.  This turns the balance of giving and removing ticks
    and nils the effect of the CPU busy-tick, catapulting the task(s) to
    highly interactive status - while in reality they are constantly burning
    CPU time.
    
    The fix is to round down sleep_time, not to round it up.  This slightly
    under-estimates the sleep time, but this is not a real problem, any task
    with a sleep time in the 1 jiffy range will see timekeeping granularity
    artifacts from various parts of the kernel anyway.  We could use rdtsc
    to estimate the sleep time, but i think that's unnecessary overhead.
    
    The fixups in Mike's scheduler patch (which is in -mm8) basically work
    around this bug.  The patch below definitely fixes the contest-load
    starvation bug, but it remains to be seen what other effects it has on
    interactivity.  In any case, this bug in the estimator is real and if
    there's any other interactivity problem around then we need to deal with
    it ontop of this patch.
    
    This bug has been in the O(1) scheduler from day 1 on basically, so i'm
    quite hopeful that a number of interactivity complaints are fixed by
    this patch.
    51d38a67
sched.c 62.8 KB