linux-imx

sched/numa: Stagger NUMA balancing scan periods for new threads

Threads share an address space and each can change the protections of the
same address space to trap NUMA faults. This is redundant and potentially
counter-productive as any thread doing the update will suffice. Potentially
only one thread is required but that thread may be idle or it may not have
any locality concerns and pick an unsuitable scan rate.

This patch uses independent scan period but they are staggered based on
the number of address space users when the thread is created.  The intent
is that threads will avoid scanning at the same time and have a chance
to adapt their scan rate later if necessary. This reduces the total scan
activity early in the lifetime of the threads.

The different in headline performance across a range of machines and
workloads is marginal but the system CPU usage is reduced as well as overall
scan activity.  The following is the time reported by NAS Parallel Benchmark
using unbound openmp threads and a D size class:

			      4.17.0-rc1             4.17.0-rc1
				 vanilla           stagger-v1r1
	Time bt.D      442.77 (   0.00%)      419.70 (   5.21%)
	Time cg.D      171.90 (   0.00%)      180.85 (  -5.21%)
	Time ep.D       33.10 (   0.00%)       32.90 (   0.60%)
	Time is.D        9.59 (   0.00%)        9.42 (   1.77%)
	Time lu.D      306.75 (   0.00%)      304.65 (   0.68%)
	Time mg.D       54.56 (   0.00%)       52.38 (   4.00%)
	Time sp.D     1020.03 (   0.00%)      903.77 (  11.40%)
	Time ua.D      400.58 (   0.00%)      386.49 (   3.52%)

Note it's not a universal win but we have no prior knowledge of which
thread matters but the number of threads created often exceeds the size
of the node when the threads are not bound. However, there is a reducation
of overall system CPU usage:

				    4.17.0-rc1             4.17.0-rc1
				       vanilla           stagger-v1r1
	sys-time-bt.D         48.78 (   0.00%)       48.22 (   1.15%)
	sys-time-cg.D         25.31 (   0.00%)       26.63 (  -5.22%)
	sys-time-ep.D          1.65 (   0.00%)        0.62 (  62.42%)
	sys-time-is.D         40.05 (   0.00%)       24.45 (  38.95%)
	sys-time-lu.D         37.55 (   0.00%)       29.02 (  22.72%)
	sys-time-mg.D         47.52 (   0.00%)       34.92 (  26.52%)
	sys-time-sp.D        119.01 (   0.00%)      109.05 (   8.37%)
	sys-time-ua.D         51.52 (   0.00%)       45.13 (  12.40%)

NUMA scan activity is also reduced:

	NUMA alloc local               1042828     1342670
	NUMA base PTE updates        140481138    93577468
	NUMA huge PMD updates           272171      180766
	NUMA page range updates      279832690   186129660
	NUMA hint faults               1395972     1193897
	NUMA hint local faults          877925      855053
	NUMA hint local percent             62          71
	NUMA pages migrated           12057909     9158023

Similar observations are made for other thread-intensive workloads. System
CPU usage is lower even though the headline gains in performance tend to be
small. For example, specjbb 2005 shows almost no difference in performance
but scan activity is reduced by a third on a 4-socket box. I didn't find
a workload (thread intensive or otherwise) that suffered badly.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180504154109.mvrha2qo5wdl65vr@techsingularity.net
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>