On 14/09/20 11:03, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> The 25% default imbalance threshold for DIE and NUMA domain is large
> enough to generate significant unfairness between threads. A typical
> example is the case of 11 threads running on 2x4 CPUs. The imbalance of
> 20% between the 2 groups of 4 cores is just low enough to not trigger
> the load balance between the 2 groups. We will have always the same 6
> threads on one group of 4 CPUs and the other 5 threads on the other
> group of CPUS. With a fair time sharing in each group, we ends up with
> +20% running time for the group of 5 threads.
>
AIUI this is the culprit:
if (100 * busiest->avg_load <=
env->sd->imbalance_pct * local->avg_load)
goto out_balanced;
As in your case imbalance_pct=120 becomes the tipping point.
Now, ultimately this would need to scale based on the underlying topology,
right? If you have a system with 2x32 cores running {33 threads, 34
threads}, the tipping point becomes imbalance_pct≈103; but then since you
have this many more cores, it is somewhat questionable.
> Consider decreasing the imbalance threshold for overloaded case where we
> use the load to balance task and to ensure fair time sharing.
>
> Signed-off-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guit...@linaro.org>
> ---
> kernel/sched/topology.c | 2 +-
> 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> diff --git a/kernel/sched/topology.c b/kernel/sched/topology.c
> index 9079d865a935..1a84b778755d 100644
> --- a/kernel/sched/topology.c
> +++ b/kernel/sched/topology.c
> @@ -1337,7 +1337,7 @@ sd_init(struct sched_domain_topology_level *tl,
> .min_interval = sd_weight,
> .max_interval = 2*sd_weight,
> .busy_factor = 32,
> - .imbalance_pct = 125,
> + .imbalance_pct = 117,
>
> .cache_nice_tries = 0,
