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authorGregory Haskins <ghaskins@novell.com>2008-05-12 15:20:41 -0400
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>2008-06-06 09:19:25 -0400
commit45c01e824991b2dd0a332e19efc4901acb31209f (patch)
tree20d889b97636410c6ae425ff5dec90479d8cbb1a /net
parent39b945a37bac2b692773a470890c8ba301485b15 (diff)
sched: prioritize non-migratable tasks over migratable ones
Dmitry Adamushko pointed out a known flaw in the rt-balancing algorithm that could allow suboptimal balancing if a non-migratable task gets queued behind a running migratable one. It is discussed in this thread: http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/22/296 This issue has been further exacerbated by a recent checkin to sched-devel (git-id 5eee63a5ebc19a870ac40055c0be49457f3a89a3). >From a pure priority standpoint, the run-queue is doing the "right" thing. Using Dmitry's nomenclature, if T0 is on cpu1 first, and T1 wakes up at equal or lower priority (affined only to cpu1) later, it *should* wait for T0 to finish. However, in reality that is likely suboptimal from a system perspective if there are other cores that could allow T0 and T1 to run concurrently. Since T1 can not migrate, the only choice for higher concurrency is to try to move T0. This is not something we addessed in the recent rt-balancing re-work. This patch tries to enhance the balancing algorithm by accomodating this scenario. It accomplishes this by incorporating the migratability of a task into its priority calculation. Within a numerical tsk->prio, a non-migratable task is logically higher than a migratable one. We maintain this by introducing a new per-priority queue (xqueue, or exclusive-queue) for holding non-migratable tasks. The scheduler will draw from the xqueue over the standard shared-queue (squeue) when available. There are several details for utilizing this properly. 1) During task-wake-up, we not only need to check if the priority preempts the current task, but we also need to check for this non-migratable condition. Therefore, if a non-migratable task wakes up and sees an equal priority migratable task already running, it will attempt to preempt it *if* there is a likelyhood that the current task will find an immediate home. 2) Tasks only get this non-migratable "priority boost" on wake-up. Any requeuing will result in the non-migratable task being queued to the end of the shared queue. This is an attempt to prevent the system from being completely unfair to migratable tasks during things like SCHED_RR timeslicing. I am sure this patch introduces potentially "odd" behavior if you concoct a scenario where a bunch of non-migratable threads could starve migratable ones given the right pattern. I am not yet convinced that this is a problem since we are talking about tasks of equal RT priority anyway, and there never is much in the way of guarantees against starvation under that scenario anyway. (e.g. you could come up with a similar scenario with a specific timing environment verses an affinity environment). I can be convinced otherwise, but for now I think this is "ok". Signed-off-by: Gregory Haskins <ghaskins@novell.com> CC: Dmitry Adamushko <dmitry.adamushko@gmail.com> CC: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
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