linux-phytec-fsl

sched, cgroup: Reduce rq->lock hold times for large cgroup hierarchies

Peter Portante reported that for large cgroup hierarchies (and or on
large CPU counts) we get immense lock contention on rq->lock and stuff
stops working properly.

His workload was a ton of processes, each in their own cgroup,
everybody idling except for a sporadic wakeup once every so often.

It was found that:

  schedule()
    idle_balance()
      load_balance()
        local_irq_save()
        double_rq_lock()
        update_h_load()
          walk_tg_tree(tg_load_down)
            tg_load_down()

Results in an entire cgroup hierarchy walk under rq->lock for every
new-idle balance and since new-idle balance isn't throttled this
results in a lot of work while holding the rq->lock.

This patch does two things, it removes the work from under rq->lock
based on the good principle of race and pray which is widely employed
in the load-balancer as a whole. And secondly it throttles the
update_h_load() calculation to max once per jiffy.

I considered excluding update_h_load() for new-idle balance
all-together, but purely relying on regular balance passes to update
this data might not work out under some rare circumstances where the
new-idle busiest isn't the regular busiest for a while (unlikely, but
a nightmare to debug if someone hits it and suffers).

Cc: pjt@google.com
Cc: Larry Woodman <lwoodman@redhat.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Reported-by: Peter Portante <pportant@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/tip-aaarrzfpnaam7pqrekofu8a6@git.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>