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>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sched.c b/kernel/sched.c
index bfb8ad8ed171..7178b8c2351c 100644
--- a/kernel/sched.c
+++ b/kernel/sched.c
@@ -151,7 +151,8 @@ static inline int task_has_rt_policy(struct task_struct *p)
  */
 struct rt_prio_array {
 	DECLARE_BITMAP(bitmap, MAX_RT_PRIO+1); /* include 1 bit for delimiter */
-	struct list_head queue[MAX_RT_PRIO];
+	struct list_head xqueue[MAX_RT_PRIO]; /* exclusive queue */
+	struct list_head squeue[MAX_RT_PRIO];  /* shared queue */
 };
 
 struct rt_bandwidth {
@@ -7542,7 +7543,8 @@ static void init_rt_rq(struct rt_rq *rt_rq, struct rq *rq)
 
 	array = &rt_rq->active;
 	for (i = 0; i < MAX_RT_PRIO; i++) {
-		INIT_LIST_HEAD(array->queue + i);
+		INIT_LIST_HEAD(array->xqueue + i);
+		INIT_LIST_HEAD(array->squeue + i);
 		__clear_bit(i, array->bitmap);
 	}
 	/* delimiter for bitsearch: */