[RFC PATCH v2 3/6] sched: pack small tasks

[Mike Galbraith]

On Thu, 2012-12-13 at 22:25 +0800, Alex Shi wrote: 
> On 12/13/2012 06:11 PM, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > On 13 December 2012 03:17, Alex Shi <alex.shi at intel.com> wrote:
> >> On 12/12/2012 09:31 PM, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> >>> During the creation of sched_domain, we define a pack buddy CPU for each CPU
> >>> when one is available. We want to pack at all levels where a group of CPU can
> >>> be power gated independently from others.
> >>> On a system that can't power gate a group of CPUs independently, the flag is
> >>> set at all sched_domain level and the buddy is set to -1. This is the default
> >>> behavior.
> >>> On a dual clusters / dual cores system which can power gate each core and
> >>> cluster independently, the buddy configuration will be :
> >>>
> >>>       | Cluster 0   | Cluster 1   |
> >>>       | CPU0 | CPU1 | CPU2 | CPU3 |
> >>> -----------------------------------
> >>> buddy | CPU0 | CPU0 | CPU0 | CPU2 |
> >>>
> >>> Small tasks tend to slip out of the periodic load balance so the best place
> >>> to choose to migrate them is during their wake up. The decision is in O(1) as
> >>> we only check again one buddy CPU
> >>
> >> Just have a little worry about the scalability on a big machine, like on
> >> a 4 sockets NUMA machine * 8 cores * HT machine, the buddy cpu in whole
> >> system need care 64 LCPUs. and in your case cpu0 just care 4 LCPU. That
> >> is different on task distribution decision.
> > 
> > The buddy CPU should probably not be the same for all 64 LCPU it
> > depends on where it's worth packing small tasks
> 
> Do you have further ideas for buddy cpu on such example?
> > 
> > Which kind of sched_domain configuration have you for such system ?
> > and how many sched_domain level have you ?
> 
> it is general X86 domain configuration. with 4 levels,
> sibling/core/cpu/numa.

CPU is a bug that slipped into domain degeneration.  You should have
SIBLING/MC/NUMA (chasing that down is on todo).

-Mike