[PATCH] sched: less locking

During periodic load balancing, don't hold this runqueue's lock while
scanning remote runqueues, which can take a non trivial amount of time
especially on very large systems.

Holding the runqueue lock will only help to stabilise ->nr_running, however
this doesn't do much to help because tasks being woken will simply get held
up on the runqueue lock, so ->nr_running would not provide a really
accurate picture of runqueue load in that case anyway.

What's more, ->nr_running (and possibly the cpu_load averages) of remote
runqueues won't be stable anyway, so load balancing is always an inexact
operation.

Signed-off-by: Nick Piggin <npiggin@suse.de>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sched.c b/kernel/sched.c
index 930189540f3b..8535e5c68f5b 100644
--- a/kernel/sched.c
+++ b/kernel/sched.c
@@ -2075,7 +2075,6 @@ static int load_balance(int this_cpu, runqueue_t *this_rq,
         int nr_moved, all_pinned = 0;
         int active_balance = 0;
 
-        spin_lock(&this_rq->lock);
         schedstat_inc(sd, lb_cnt[idle]);
 
         group = find_busiest_group(sd, this_cpu, &imbalance, idle);
@@ -2102,18 +2101,16 @@ static int load_balance(int this_cpu, runqueue_t *this_rq,
                  * still unbalanced. nr_moved simply stays zero, so it is
                  * correctly treated as an imbalance.
                  */
-                double_lock_balance(this_rq, busiest);
+                double_rq_lock(this_rq, busiest);
                 nr_moved = move_tasks(this_rq, this_cpu, busiest,
                                         imbalance, sd, idle, &all_pinned);
-                spin_unlock(&busiest->lock);
+                double_rq_unlock(this_rq, busiest);
 
                 /* All tasks on this runqueue were pinned by CPU affinity */
                 if (unlikely(all_pinned))
                         goto out_balanced;
         }
 
-        spin_unlock(&this_rq->lock);
-
         if (!nr_moved) {
                 schedstat_inc(sd, lb_failed[idle]);
                 sd->nr_balance_failed++;
@@ -2156,8 +2153,6 @@ static int load_balance(int this_cpu, runqueue_t *this_rq,
         return nr_moved;
 
 out_balanced:
-        spin_unlock(&this_rq->lock);
-
         schedstat_inc(sd, lb_balanced[idle]);
 
         sd->nr_balance_failed = 0;