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    sched/fair: Force balancing on NOHZ balance if local group has capacity · 583ffd99
    Brendan Jackman authored
    The "goto force_balance" here is intended to mitigate the fact that
    avg_load calculations can result in bad placement decisions when
    priority is asymmetrical.
    
    The original commit that adds it:
    
      fab47622
    
     ("sched: Force balancing on newidle balance if local group has capacity")
    
    explains:
    
        Under certain situations, such as a niced down task (i.e. nice =
        -15) in the presence of nr_cpus NICE0 tasks, the niced task lands
        on a sched group and kicks away other tasks because of its large
        weight. This leads to sub-optimal utilization of the
        machine. Even though the sched group has capacity, it does not
        pull tasks because sds.this_load >> sds.max_load, and f_b_g()
        returns NULL.
    
    A similar but inverted issue also affects ARM big.LITTLE (asymmetrical CPU
    capacity) systems - consider 8 always-running, same-priority tasks on a
    system with 4 "big" and 4 "little" CPUs. Suppose that 5 of them end up on
    the "big" CPUs (which will be represented by one sched_group in the DIE
    sched_domain) and 3 on the "little" (the other sched_group in DIE), leaving
    one CPU unused. Because the "big" group has a higher group_capacity its
    avg_load may not present an imbalance that would cause migrating a
    task to the idle "little".
    
    The force_balance case here solves the problem but currently only for
    CPU_NEWLY_IDLE balances, which in theory might never happen on the
    unused CPU. Including CPU_IDLE in the force_balance case means
    there's an upper bound on the time before we can attempt to solve the
    underutilization: after DIE's sd->balance_interval has passed the
    next nohz balance kick will help us out.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarBrendan Jackman <brendan.jackman@arm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
    Cc: Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>
    Cc: Paul Turner <pjt@google.com>
    Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
    Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170807163900.25180-1-brendan.jackman@arm.com
    
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
    583ffd99