[RFC PATCH v2 2/2] scheduler: add scheduler level for clusters

[Mel Gorman]

On Thu, Dec 03, 2020 at 10:28:31AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 04:04:04PM +0000, Valentin Schneider wrote:
> > 
> > Gating this behind this new config only leveraged by arm64 doesn't make it
> > very generic. Note that powerpc also has this newish "CACHE" level which
> > seems to overlap in function with your "CLUSTER" one (both are arch
> > specific, though).
> > 
> > I think what you are after here is an SD_SHARE_PKG_RESOURCES domain walk,
> > i.e. scan CPUs by increasing cache "distance". We already have it in some
> > form, as we scan SMT & LLC domains; AFAICT LLC always maps to MC, except
> > for said powerpc's CACHE thingie.
> 
> There's some intel chips with a smaller L2, but I don't think we ever
> bothered.
> 
> There's also the extended topology stuff from Intel: SMT, Core, Module,
> Tile, Die, of which we've only partially used Die I think.
> 
> Whatever we do, it might make sense to not all use different names.
> 
> Also, I think Mel said he was cooking something for
> select_idle_balance().
> 
> Also, I've previously posted patches that fold all the iterations into
> one, so it might make sense to revisit some of that if Mel also already
> didn.t

I didn't. The NUMA/lb reconcilation took most of my attention and right
now I'm looking at select_idle_sibling again in preparation for tracking
the idle cpumask in a sensible fashion. The main idea I had in mind was
special casing EPYC as it has multiple small L3 caches that may benefit
from select_idle_sibling looking slightly beyond the LLC as a search
domain but it has not even started yet.

-- 
Mel Gorman
SUSE Labs