sched/fair: Implement fast idling of CPUs when the system is partially loaded

When a system is lightly loaded (i.e. no more than 1 job per cpu),
attempt to pull job to a cpu before putting it to idle is unnecessary and
can be skipped.  This patch adds an indicator so the scheduler can know
when there's no more than 1 active job is on any CPU in the system to
skip needless job pulls.

On a 4 socket machine with a request/response kind of workload from
clients, we saw about 0.13 msec delay when we go through a full load
balance to try pull job from all the other cpus.  While 0.1 msec was
spent on processing the request and generating a response, the 0.13 msec
load balance overhead was actually more than the actual work being done.
This overhead can be skipped much of the time for lightly loaded systems.

With this patch, we tested with a netperf request/response workload that
has the server busy with half the cpus in a 4 socket system.  We found
the patch eliminated 75% of the load balance attempts before idling a cpu.

The overhead of setting/clearing the indicator is low as we already gather
the necessary info while we call add_nr_running() and update_sd_lb_stats.()
We switch to full load balance load immediately if any cpu got more than
one job on its run queue in add_nr_running.  We'll clear the indicator
to avoid load balance when we detect no cpu's have more than one job
when we scan the work queues in update_sg_lb_stats().  We are aggressive
in turning on the load balance and opportunistic in skipping the load
balance.

Signed-off-by: Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jason Low <jason.low2@hp.com>
Cc: "Paul E.McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Davidlohr Bueso <davidlohr@hp.com>
Cc: Alex Shi <alex.shi@linaro.org>
Cc: Michel Lespinasse <walken@google.com>
Cc: Peter Hurley <peter@hurleysoftware.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1403551009.2970.613.camel@schen9-DESK
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sched/sched.h b/kernel/sched/sched.h
index eb85676..0191ed5 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/sched.h
+++ b/kernel/sched/sched.h
@@ -477,6 +477,9 @@ struct root_domain {
 	cpumask_var_t span;
 	cpumask_var_t online;
 
+	/* Indicate more than one runnable task for any CPU */
+	bool overload;
+
 	/*
 	 * The bit corresponding to a CPU gets set here if such CPU has more
 	 * than one runnable -deadline task (as it is below for RT tasks).
@@ -1218,8 +1221,13 @@ static inline void add_nr_running(struct rq *rq, unsigned count)
 
 	rq->nr_running = prev_nr + count;
 
-#ifdef CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL
 	if (prev_nr < 2 && rq->nr_running >= 2) {
+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+		if (!rq->rd->overload)
+			rq->rd->overload = true;
+#endif
+
+#ifdef CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL
 		if (tick_nohz_full_cpu(rq->cpu)) {
 			/*
 			 * Tick is needed if more than one task runs on a CPU.
@@ -1231,8 +1239,8 @@ static inline void add_nr_running(struct rq *rq, unsigned count)
 			 */
 			tick_nohz_full_kick_cpu(rq->cpu);
 		}
-       }
 #endif
+	}
 }
 
 static inline void sub_nr_running(struct rq *rq, unsigned count)