Currently, a task's deadline is computed as its vtime + a scaled function of
its average runtime (with its deadline being scaled down if it's more
interactive). This makes sense intuitively, as we do want an interactive task
to have an earlier deadline, but it also has some flaws.
For one thing, we're currently ignoring duty cycle when determining a task's
deadline. This has a few implications. Firstly, because we reward tasks with
higher waker and blocked frequencies due to considering them to be part of a
work chain, we implicitly penalize tasks that rarely ever use the CPU because
those frequencies are low. While those tasks are likely not part of a work
chain, they also should get an interactivity boost just by pure virtue of not
using the CPU very often. This should in theory be addressed by vruntime, but
because we cap the amount of vtime that a task can accumulate to one slice, it
may not be adequately reflected after a task runs for the first time.
Another problem is that we're minimizing a task's deadline if it's interactive,
but we're also not really penalizing a task that's a super CPU hog by
increasing its deadline. We sort of do a bit by applying a higher niceness
which gives it a higher deadline for a lower weight, but its somewhat minimal
considering that we're using niceness, and that the best an interactive task
can do is minimize its deadline to near zero relative to its vtime.
What we really want to do is "negatively" scale an interactive task's deadline
with the same magnitude as we "positively" scale a CPU-hogging task's deadline.
To do this, we make two major changes to how we compute deadline:
1. Instead of using niceness, we now instead use our own straightforward
scaling factor. This was chosen arbitrarily to be a scaling by 1000, but we
can and should improve this in the future.
2. We now create a _signed_ linear latency priority factor as a sum of the
three following inputs:
- Work-chain factor (log_2 of product of blocked freq and waker freq)
- Inverse duty cycle factor (log_2 of the inverse of a task's duty cycle --
higher duty cycle means lower factor)
- Average runtime factor (Higher avg runtime means higher average runtime
factor)
We then compute the latency priority as:
lat_prio := Average runtime factor - (work-chain factor + duty cycle factor)
This gives us a signed value that can be negative. With this, we can compute a
non-negative weight value by calculating a weight from the absolute value of
lat_prio, and use this to scale slice_ns. If lat_prio is negative we calculate
a task's deadline as its vtime MINUS its scaled slice_ns, and if it's positive,
it's the task's vtime PLUS scaled slice_ns.
This ends up working well because you get a higher weight both for highly
interactive tasks, and highly CPU-hogging / non-interactive tasks, which lets
you scale a task's deadline "more negatively" for interactive tasks, and "more
positively" for the CPU hogs.
With this change, we get a significant improvement in FPS. On a 7950X, if I run
the following workload:
$ stress-ng -c $((8 * $(nproc)))
1. I get 60 FPS when playing Stellaris (while time is progressing at max
speed), whereas EEVDF gets 6-7 FPS.
2. I get ~15-40 FPS while playing Civ6, whereas EEVDF seems to get < 1 FPS. The
Civ6 benchmark doesn't even start after over 4 minutes in the initial frame
with EEVDF, but gets us 13s / turn with rusty.
3. It seems that EEVDF has improved with Terraria in v6.9. It was able to
maintain ~30-55 FPS, as opposed to the ~5-10FPS we've seen in the past.
rusty is still able to maintain a solid 60-62FPS consistently with no
problem, however.
Periodically report to stdout samples of the effective time slice
applied to tasks.
While one could determine this metric by examining the max slice_ns and
nr_waiting metrics, directly reporting it to stdout allows users to
quickly identify what is happening and it provides a clearer overview of
the scheduling behavior.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Dispatching per-CPU kthreads directly is disabled by default, reporting
this metric can generate some confusion (since it is always 0), and even
if local kthread dispatches are enabled, they should be still considered
as regular direct dispatches (there is no difference in practice).
Therefore, merge direct kthread dispatches into direct dispatches and
drop the separate nr_kthread_dispatches metric.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Scale the task's time slice based on the average amount of tasks that
are currently waiting to be dispatched.
Use a moving average for the amount of waiting tasks to smooth out
potential spikes caused by temporary bursts of tasks piling in the wait
queues.
This was initially modeled in scx_rustland and it seems to work pretty
well also in scx_bpfland now.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
With all the other optimizations and tunings, it turns out that maintaining
two runqueues has more harm than good.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
Further depenalize above-average latency-critical tasks and penalize
further below-avergage latency-critical tasks in ineligibility duration.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
LAVD_VDL_LOOSENESS_FT represents how loose the deadline is. The smaller
value means the deadline is tighter. While it is unlikely to be tuned,
let's keep it as a tunable for now.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
Non-kthreads with custom affinities in non-open layers are dispatched into a
LO_FALLBACK_DSQ, with the idea being that they're penalized for their custom
affinities. When a host is fully utilized, these tasks can end up being starved
due to LO_FALLBACK_DSQ being consumed only when there are no other layers to
consume from. In internal workloads at Meta, we've observed that this can
happen in practice.
Longer term, we can probably address this by implementing layer weights and
applying that to fallback DSQs to avoid starvation. For now, let's just
dispatch them to HI_FALLBACK_DSQ to avoid this starvation issue.
Signed-off-by: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
Refactor the main module for scx_layered to move metrics into a separate
module. This change does no functional differences, only code structure.
This will make it a little easier to navigate the logic in the main
scheduler code.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Hodges <hodges.daniel.scott@gmail.com>
That is okay since the runtime is considered in calculating a virtual
deadline. A shorter runtime will result in a tighter deadline linearly.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
If inheriting the parent's properties, a new fork task tends to be too
prioritized. That is, many parent processes, such as `make,` are a bit
more latency-critical than average.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
Instead of using a static value to classify tasks based on their average
amount of voluntary context switches, try to periodically evaluate an
optimal threshold, based on a global average of voluntary context
switches among of all the running tasks.
Tasks with an average amount of voluntary context switches greater than
the global average will be classified as interactive.
The global average is evaluated as an exponentially weighted moving
average (EWMA), as:
avg(t) = avg(t - 1) * 0.75 - task_avg(t) * 0.25
This approach is more efficient than iterating through all tasks and it
helps to prevent rapid fluctuations that may be caused by bursts of
voluntary context switch events.
The dynamic nvcsw threshold enables a more precise adjustment of
the classification criteria to swiftly respond to global system changes:
tasks can be quickly classified as interactive, but if the system
experiences too many interactive events, the criteria for maintaining
interactive status become stricter. This creates a natural selection
process where only the most deserving tasks remain interactive.
Additionally, introduce the new option `--nvcsw-max-thresh N`, which
allows to extend or restrict the fluctuation range of the global average
threshold for voluntary context switches.
Tested-by: Piotr Gorski <piotrgorski@cachyos.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Advancing the clock slower when overloaded gives more opportunities for
latency-critical tasks to cut in the run queue. Controlling the clock
better reflects the actual load than the prior approach of stretching
the time-space when overloaded.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
We now maintain two run queues—an eligible run queue (DSQ) and an
ineligible run queue (rbtree)—sorted by the task's virtual deadline.
When the eligible run queue is empty, or the ineligible run queue has
not been consumed for too long (e.g., 15 msec), a task in the ineligible
run queue is moved to the eligible run queue for execution. With these
two queues, we have a better admission control.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
Followed commit 1c3b563, move the checking of task.migrated.get() into
the vector filter. In this way, we can remove the skip_while() call in
find_first_candidate().
Signed-off-by: I Hsin Cheng <richard120310@gmail.com>
This change refactors some of the helper methods for getting the
preferred node for tasks using mempolicy. The load balancing logic in
try_find_move_task is updated to allow for a filter, which is used to
filter for tasks with a preferred mempolicy.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Hodges <hodges.daniel.scott@gmail.com>
This change makes scx_rusty mempolicy aware. When a process uses
set_mempolicy it can change NUMA memory preferences and cause
performance issues when tasks are scheduled on remote NUMA nodes. This
change modifies task_pick_domain to use the new helper method that
returns the preferred node id.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Hodges <hodges.daniel.scott@gmail.com>
Estimating the service time from run time and frequency is not
incorrect. However, it reacts slowly to sudden changes since it relies
on the moving average. Hence, we directly measure the service time to
enforce fairness.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
Instead of performing domain mask checking inside
"find_first_candidate()" every time, check whether the tasks within push
domain are abled to run on pull domain by performing the mask check at
vector generation stage.
This way can also avoid repeated computation generated by the same
(task, pull_dom) pair as they'll try to check whether the pull domain is
in the task domain mask.
Also since whether a task is a kworker won't change in time, we can
perform the check earlier and put it in the filter, too.
Signed-off-by: I Hsin Cheng <richard120310@gmail.com>
We always use nr_cpu_ids to represent the maximum CPU id returned by
scx_bpf_nr_cpu_ids().
Replace cpu_max with nr_cpu_ids to be more consistent with the rest of
the code.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
We can rely on scx_bpf_nr_cpu_ids() to create all the possible per-CPU
DSQs, eliminating the need for the hard-coded limit MAX_CPUS.
In this way scx_bpfland can support the same amount of CPUs that the
kernel can handle.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Instead of constantly checking the need to drain tasks from the DSQs of
the offline CPUs, provide an atomic flag to notify when there are tasks
to be drained from the offline CPUs.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Refine the safeguard mechanism to avoid generating too many interactive
tasks in the system, which could nullify the effect of the
interactive/regular task classification.
The safeguard mechanism operates by pausing the promotion of new tasks
to interactive status during the task wake-up process, whenever the
number of interactive tasks in the priority queue exceeds a specific
limit (set to 4x the number of online CPUs).
Halting the promotion of additional interactive tasks allows to
prioritize those already classified as interactive, thereby preventing
potential "bursts" of excessive interactive tasks in the system.
This refines the mitigation already provided by commit 640bd562
("scx_bpfland: prevent tasks from abusing interactive priority boost").
Fixes: 640bd562 ("scx_bpfland: prevent tasks from abusing interactive priority boost")
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
Always assign the maximum time slice if there are idle CPUs in the
system.
Otherwise, double the task's unused time slice to reward tasks that use
less CPU time and at the same time refill the time slice of the tasks
every time they're dispatched.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@gmail.com>
sched_ext is about to be merged upstream. There are some compatibility
breaking changes and we're making the current sched_ext/for-6.11
1edab907b57d ("sched_ext/scx_qmap: Pick idle CPU for direct dispatch on
!wakeup enqueues") the baseline.
Tag everything except scx_mitosis as 1.0.0. As scx_mitosis is still in early
development and is currently temporarily disabled, only the patchlevel is
bumped.
Sync from sched_ext/for-6.11 1edab907b57d ("sched_ext/scx_qmap: Pick idle
CPU for direct dispatch on !wakeup enqueues")
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tj/sched_ext.git for-6.11
- cgroup support hasn't landed in the upstream kernel yet. This most likely
will happen in a few weeks. For the time being, disable scx_flatcg,
scx_pair and scx_mitosis.
- Compat macro for DSQ task iterator dropped. This is now a part of
the baseline.
- scx_bpf_consume() isn't upstream yet. BPF interfacing side is still being
discussed. Dropped example usage from tools/sched_ext. None of the
practical schedulers use it, so this should be fine for now.
- scx_bpf_cpu_rq() added.
- AUTOATTACH workaround for newer libbpf versions added.
A task can become a runnable on any task's context not only its waker
task. Thus, we should not count wake-up on unrelated task's context.
With this commit, the scheduler can (much more) accurately detect
waker-wakee relationsships.
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
The prior approach using the sum of weights gives too much penalty to
nice tasks with large nice values. With this commit, the time slice is
determined by the number of runnable tasks regardless of nice priority.
Note that the fairness will still be enforced based on tasks' nice
priorities (weights).
Signed-off-by: Changwoo Min <changwoo@igalia.com>
