linux-imx

sched/core: Optimize sched_feat() for !CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG builds

When the kernel is compiled with !CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG support, we expect that
all SCHED_FEAT are turned into compile time constants being propagated
to support compiler optimizations.

Specifically, we expect that code blocks like this:

   if (sched_feat(FEATURE_NAME) [&& <other_conditions>]) {
	/* FEATURE CODE */
   }

are turned into dead-code in case FEATURE_NAME defaults to FALSE, and thus
being removed by the compiler from the finale image.

For this mechanism to properly work it's required for the compiler to
have full access, from each translation unit, to whatever is the value
defined by the sched_feat macro. This macro is defined as:

   #define sched_feat(x) (sysctl_sched_features & (1UL << __SCHED_FEAT_##x))

and thus, the compiler can optimize that code only if the value of
sysctl_sched_features is visible within each translation unit.

Since:

   029632fbb ("sched: Make separate sched*.c translation units")

the scheduler code has been split into separate translation units
however the definition of sysctl_sched_features is part of
kernel/sched/core.c while, for all the other scheduler modules, it is
visible only via kernel/sched/sched.h as an:

   extern const_debug unsigned int sysctl_sched_features

Unfortunately, an extern reference does not allow the compiler to apply
constants propagation. Thus, on !CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG kernel we still end up
with code to load a memory reference and (eventually) doing an unconditional
jump of a chunk of code.

This mechanism is unavoidable when sched_features can be turned on and off at
run-time. However, this is not the case for "production" kernels compiled with
!CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG. In this case, sysctl_sched_features is just a constant value
which cannot be changed at run-time and thus memory loads and jumps can be
avoided altogether.

This patch fixes the case of !CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG kernel by declaring a local version
of the sysctl_sched_features constant for each translation unit. This will
ultimately allow the compiler to perform constants propagation and dead-code
pruning.

Tests have been done, with !CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG on a v4.14-rc8 with and without
the patch, by running 30 iterations of:

   perf bench sched messaging --pipe --thread --group 4 --loop 50000

on a 40 cores Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v2 @ 3.00GHz using the
powersave governor to rule out variations due to frequency scaling.

Statistics on the reported completion time:

                   count     mean       std     min       99%     max
  v4.14-rc8         30.0  15.7831  0.176032  15.442  16.01226  16.014
  v4.14-rc8+patch   30.0  15.5033  0.189681  15.232  15.93938  15.962

... show a 1.8% speedup on average completion time and 0.5% speedup in the
99 percentile.

Signed-off-by: Patrick Bellasi <patrick.bellasi@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Chris Redpath <chris.redpath@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@arm.com>
Reviewed-by: Brendan Jackman <brendan.jackman@arm.com>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@redhat.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20171108184101.16006-1-patrick.bellasi@arm.com
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>