summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/include/linux
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
authorShrikanth Hegde <sshegde@linux.ibm.com>2026-01-15 13:05:24 +0530
committerPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>2026-01-15 22:41:27 +0100
commit5d86d542f68fda7ef6d543ac631b741db734101a (patch)
treea4c87238827e1d4a93072e0851fa8e0031141968 /include/linux
parent94e70734b4d034b9df795bd1ad3452ea96e742ca (diff)
sched/fair: Remove nohz.nr_cpus and use weight of cpumask instead
nohz.nr_cpus was observed as contended cacheline when running enterprise workload on large systems. Fundamental scalability challenge with nohz.idle_cpus_mask and nohz.nr_cpus is the following: (1) nohz_balancer_kick() observes (reads) nohz.nr_cpus (or nohz.idle_cpu_mask) and nohz.has_blocked to see whether there's any nohz balancing work to do, in every scheduler tick. (2) nohz_balance_enter_idle() and nohz_balance_exit_idle() (through nohz_balancer_kick() via sched_tick()) modify (write) nohz.nr_cpus (and/or nohz.idle_cpu_mask) and nohz.has_blocked. The characteristic frequencies are the following: (1) nohz_balancer_kick() happens at scheduler (busy)tick frequency on CPU(which has not gone idle). This is a relatively constant frequency in the ~1 kHz range or lower. (2) happens at idle enter/exit frequency on every CPU that goes to idle. This is workload dependent, but can easily be hundreds of kHz for IO-bound loads and high CPU counts. Ie. can be orders of magnitude higher than (1), in which case a cachemiss at every invocation of (1) is almost inevitable. idle exit will trigger (1) on the CPU which is coming out of idle. There's two types of costs from these functions: (A) scheduler tick cost via (1): this happens on busy CPUs too, and is thus a primary scalability cost. But the rate here is constant and typically much lower than (B), hence the absolute benefit to workload scalability will be lower as well. (B) idle cost via (2): going-to-idle and coming-from-idle costs are secondary concerns, because they impact power efficiency more than they impact scalability. But in terms of absolute cost this scales up with nr_cpus as well, and a much faster rate, and thus may also approach and negatively impact system limits like memory bus/fabric bandwidth. Note that nohz.idle_cpus_mask and nohz.nr_cpus may appear to reside in the same cacheline, however under CONFIG_CPUMASK_OFFSTACK=y the backing storage for nohz.idle_cpus_mask will be elsewhere. With CPUMASK_OFFSTACK=n, the nohz.idle_cpus_mask and rest of nohz fields are in different cachelines under typical NR_CPUS=512/2048. This implies two separate cachelines being dirtied upon idle entry / exit. nohz.nr_cpus can be derived from the mask itself. Its usage doesn't warrant a functionally correct value. This means one less cacheline being dirtied in idle entry/exit path which helps to save some bus bandwidth w.r.t to those nohz functions(approx 50%). This in turn helps to improve enterprise workload throughput. On system with 480 CPUs, running "hackbench 40 process 10000 loops" (Avg of 3 runs) baseline: 0.81% hackbench [k] nohz_balance_exit_idle 0.21% hackbench [k] nohz_balancer_kick 0.09% swapper [k] nohz_run_idle_balance With patch: 0.35% hackbench [k] nohz_balance_exit_idle 0.09% hackbench [k] nohz_balancer_kick 0.07% swapper [k] nohz_run_idle_balance [Ingo Molnar: scalability analysis changlog] Reviewed-and-tested-by: K Prateek Nayak <kprateek.nayak@amd.com> Signed-off-by: Shrikanth Hegde <sshegde@linux.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Reviewed-by: Valentin Schneider <vschneid@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org> Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260115073524.376643-4-sshegde@linux.ibm.com
Diffstat (limited to 'include/linux')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions