With commit 5d20f89a ("scheds-rust: build rust schedulers in sequence"),
schedulers are now built serially one after the other to prevent meson
and cargo from forking NxN parallel tasks.
However, this change has made building a single scheduler much more
cumbersome, due to the chain of dependencies.
For example, building scx_rusty using the specific meson target would
still result in all schedulers being built, because they all depend on
each other.
To address this issue, introduce the new meson build option
`serialize=true|false` (default is false).
This option allows to disable the schedulers' build chain, restoring the
old behavior.
With this option enabled, it is now possible to build just a single
scheduler, parallelizing the cargo build properly, without triggering
the build of the others. Example:
$ meson setup build -Dbuildtype=release -Dserialize=false
$ meson compile -C build scx_rusty
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
In some cases, a host may have an odd topology where there are gaps in
CPU IDs (including between possible CPUs). A common pattern in
schedulers is to perform allocations for every possible CPU ID, such as
creating a per-cpu DSQ. In order to avoid confusing schedulers, let's
track the maximum CPU ID on a system so that we can return the number of
CPU IDs on the system which is inclusive of gaps.
We also update scx_rustland in this change to accommodate the fact that
we no longer export nr_cpus_possible() from TopologyMap.
Signed-off-by: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
Keep track of the maximum vruntime among all tasks and flush them if the
difference between the maximum and minimum vruntime exceeds slice_ns.
This helps to prevent excessive starvation, as every task is guaranteed
to be dispatched within the slice_ns time limit.
Tested-by: Tested-by: SoulHarsh007 <harsh.peshwani@outlook.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Make sure to never assign a time slice longer than the default time
slice, that can be used as an upper limit.
This seems to prevent potential stall conditions (reported by the
CachyOS community) when running CPU-intensive workloads, such as:
[ 68.062813] sched_ext: BPF scheduler "rustland" errored, disabling
[ 68.062831] sched_ext: runnable task stall (ollama_llama_se[3312] failed to run for 5.180s)
[ 68.062832] scx_watchdog_workfn+0x154/0x1e0
[ 68.062837] process_one_work+0x18e/0x350
[ 68.062839] worker_thread+0x2fa/0x490
[ 68.062841] kthread+0xd2/0x100
[ 68.062842] ret_from_fork+0x34/0x50
[ 68.062844] ret_from_fork_asm+0x1a/0x30
Fixes: 6f4cd853 ("scx_rustland: introduce virtual time slice")
Tested-by: SoulHarsh007 <harsh.peshwani@outlook.com>
Tested-by: Piotr Gorski <piotrgorski@cachyos.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Overview
========
Currently, a task's time slice is determined based on the total number
of tasks waiting to be scheduled: the more overloaded the system, the
shorter the time slice.
This approach can help to reduce the average wait time of all tasks,
allowing them to progress more slowly, but uniformly, thus providing a
smoother overall system performance.
However, under heavy system load, this approach can lead to very short
time slices distributed among all tasks, causing excessive context
switches that can badly affect soft real-time workloads.
Moreover, the scheduler tends to operate in a bursty manner (tasks are
queued and dispatched in bursts). This can also result in fluctuations
of longer and shorter time slices, depending on the number of tasks
still waiting in the scheduler's queue.
Such behavior can also negatively impact on soft real-time workloads,
such as real-time audio processing.
Virtual time slice
==================
To mitigate this problem, introduce the concept of virtual time slice:
the idea is to evaluate the optimal time slice of a task, considering
the vruntime as a deadline for the task to complete its work before
releasing the CPU.
This is accomplished by calculating the difference between the task's
vruntime and the global current vruntime and use this value as the task
time slice:
task_slice = task_vruntime - min_vruntime
In this way, tasks that "promise" to release the CPU quickly (based on
their previous work pattern) get a much higher priority (due to
vruntime-based scheduling and the additional priority boost for being
classified as interactive), but they are also given a shorter time slice
to complete their work and fulfill their promise of rapidity.
At the same time tasks that are more CPU-intensive get de-prioritized,
but they will tend to have a longer time slice available, reducing in
this way the amount of context switches that can negatively affect their
performance.
In conclusion, latency-sensitive tasks get a high priority and a short
time slice (and they can preempt other tasks), CPU-intensive tasks get
low priority and a long time slice.
Example
=======
Let's consider the following theoretical scenario:
task | time
-----+-----
A | 1
B | 3
C | 6
D | 6
In this case task A represents a short interactive task, task C and D
are CPU-intensive tasks and task B is mainly interactive, but it also
requires some CPU time.
With a uniform time slice, scaled based on the amount of tasks, the
scheduling looks like this (assuming the time slice is 2):
A B B C C D D A B C C D D C C D D
| | | | | | | | |
`---`---`---`-`-`---`---`---`----> 9 context switches
With the virtual time slice the scheduling changes to this:
A B B C C C D A B C C C D D D D D
| | | | | | |
`---`-----`-`-`-`-----`----------> 7 context switches
In the latter scenario, tasks do not receive the same time slice scaled
by the total number of tasks waiting to be scheduled. Instead, their
time slice is adjusted based on their previous CPU usage. Tasks that
used more CPU time are given longer slices and their processing time
tends to be packed together, reducing the amount of context switches.
Meanwhile, latency-sensitive tasks can still be processed as soon as
they need to, because they get a higher priority and they can preempt
other tasks. However, they will get a short time slice, so tasks that
were incorrectly classified as interactive will still be forced to
release the CPU quickly.
Experimental results
====================
This patch has been tested on a on a 8-cores AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core
Processor (16 threads with SMT), 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070.
The test case involves the usual benchmark of playing a video game while
simultaneously overloading the system with a parallel kernel build
(`make -j32`).
The average frames per second (fps) reported by Steam is used as a
metric for measuring system responsiveness (the higher the better):
Game | before | after | delta |
---------------------------+---------+---------+--------+
Baldur's Gate 3 | 40 fps | 48 fps | +20.0% |
Counter-Strike 2 | 8 fps | 15 fps | +87.5% |
Cyberpunk 2077 | 41 fps | 46 fps | +12.2% |
Terraria | 98 fps | 108 fps | +10.2% |
Team Fortress 2 | 81 fps | 92 fps | +13.6% |
WebGL demo (firefox) [1] | 32 fps | 42 fps | +31.2% |
---------------------------+---------+---------+--------+
Apart from the massive boost with Counter-Strike 2 (that should be taken
with a grain of salt, considering the overall poor performance in both
cases), the virtual time slice seems to systematically provide a boost
in responsiveness of around +10-20% fps.
It also seems to significantly prevent potential audio cracking issues
when the system is massively overloaded: no audio cracking was detected
during the entire run of these tests with the virtual deadline change
applied.
[1] https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Make restart handling with user_exit_info simpler and consistently use the
load and report macros consistently across the rust schedulers. This makes
all schedulers automatically handle auto restarts from CPU hotplug events.
Note that this is necessary even for scx_lavd which has CPU hotplug
operations as CPU hotplug operations which took place between skel open and
scheduler init can still trigger restart.
Commit 23b0bb5f ("scx_rustland: dispatch interactive tasks on any CPU")
allows only interactive tasks to be dispatched on any CPU, enabling them
to quickly use the first idle CPU available. Non-interactive tasks, on
the other hand, are kept on the same CPU as much as possible.
This change deprioritizes CPU-intensive tasks further, but it also helps
to exploit cache locality, while latency-sensitive tasks are dispatched
sooner, improving overall responsiveness, despite the potential
migration cost.
Given this new logic, the built-idle option, which forces all tasks to
be dispatched on the CPU assigned during select_cpu(), no longer offers
significant benefits. It would merely reduce the responsiveness of
interactive tasks.
Therefore, simply remove this option, allowing the scheduler to
determine the target CPU(s) for all tasks based on their nature.
Fixes: 23b0bb5f ("scx_rustland: dispatch interactive tasks on any CPU")
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Dispatch non-interactive tasks on the CPU selected by the built-in idle
selection logic and allow interactive tasks to be dispatched on any CPU.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Do not always assign the maximum time slice to interactive tasks, but
use the same value of the dynamic time slice for everyone.
This seems to prevent potential audio cracking when the system is over
commissioned.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
The option --full-user is provided to delegate *all* scheduling
decisions to the user-space scheduler with no exception, including the
idle selection logic.
Therefore, make this option incompatible with --builtin-idle and
completely bypass the built-in idle selection logic when running in
full-user mode.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Provide a knob in scx_rustland_core to automatically turn the scheduler
into a simple FIFO when the system is underutilized.
This choice is based on the assumption that, in the case of system
underutilization (less tasks running than the amount of available CPUs),
the best scheduling policy is FIFO.
With this option enabled the scheduler starts in FIFO mode. If most of
the CPUs are busy (nr_running >= num_cpus - 1), the scheduler
immediately exits from FIFO mode and starts to apply the logic
implemented by the user-space component. Then the scheduler can switch
back to FIFO if there are no tasks waiting to be scheduled (evaluated
using a moving average).
This option can be enabled/disabled by the user-space scheduler using
the fifo_sched parameter in BpfScheduler: if set, the BPF component will
periodically check for system utilization and switch back and forth to
FIFO mode based on that.
This allows to improve performance of workloads that are using a small
amount of the available CPUs in the system, while still maintaining the
same good level of performance for interactive tasks when the system is
over commissioned.
In certain video games, such as Baldur's Gate 3 or Counter-Strike 2,
running in "normal" system conditions, we can experience a boost in fps
of approximately 4-8% with this change applied.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
This merge included additional commits that were supposed to be included
in a separate pull request and have nothing to do with the fifo-mode
changes.
Therefore, revert the whole pull request and create a separate one with
the correct list of commits required to implement this feature.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Dispatch non-interactive tasks on the CPU selected by the built-in idle
selection logic and allow interactive tasks to be dispatched on any CPU.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Do not always assign the maximum time slice to interactive tasks, but
use the same value of the dynamic time slice for everyone.
This seems to prevent potential audio cracking when the system is over
commissioned.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Provide a knob in scx_rustland_core to automatically turn the scheduler
into a simple FIFO when the system is underutilized.
This choice is based on the assumption that, in the case of system
underutilization (less tasks running than the amount of available CPUs),
the best scheduling policy is FIFO.
With this option enabled the scheduler starts in FIFO mode. If most of
the CPUs are busy (nr_running >= num_cpus - 1), the scheduler
immediately exits from FIFO mode and starts to apply the logic
implemented by the user-space component. Then the scheduler can switch
back to FIFO if there are no tasks waiting to be scheduled (evaluated
using a moving average).
This option can be enabled/disabled by the user-space scheduler using
the fifo_sched parameter in BpfScheduler: if set, the BPF component will
periodically check for system utilization and switch back and forth to
FIFO mode based on that.
This allows to improve performance of workloads that are using a small
amount of the available CPUs in the system, while still maintaining the
same good level of performance for interactive tasks when the system is
over commissioned.
In certain video games, such as Baldur's Gate 3 or Counter-Strike 2,
running in "normal" system conditions, we can experience a boost in fps
of approximately 4-8% with this change applied.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Report the amount of running tasks to stdout. This value also represents
the amount of active CPUs that are currently executing a task.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
The dynamic slice boost is not used anymore in the code, so there is no
reason to keep evaluating it.
Moreover, using it instead of the static slice boost seems to make
things worse, so let's just get rid of it.
Fixes: 0b3c399 ("scx_rustland: introduce dynamic slice boost")
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Introduce a low-power mode to force the scheduler to operate in a very
non-work conserving way, causing a significant saving in terms of power
consumption, while still providing a good level of responsiveness in the
system.
This option can be enabled in scx_rustland via the --low_power / -l
option.
The idea is to not immediately re-kick a CPU when it enters an idle
state, but do that only if there are no other tasks running in the
system.
In this way, latency-critical tasks can be still dispatched immediately
on the other active CPUs, while CPU-bound tasks will be forced to spend
more time waiting to be scheduled, basically enforcing a special CPU
throttling mechanism that affects only the tasks that are not latency
critical.
The consequence is a reduction in the overall system throughput, but
also a significant reduction of power consumption, that can be useful
for mobile / battery-powered devices.
Test case (using `scx_rustland -l`):
- play a video game (Terraria) while recompiling the kernel
- measure game performance (fps) and core power consumption (W)
- compare the result of normal mode vs low-power mode
Result:
Game performance | Power consumption |
------------+-----------------+-------------------+
normal mode | 60 fps | 6W |
low-power mode | 60 fps | 3W |
As we can see from the result the reduction of power consumption is
quite significant (50%), while the responsiveness of the game (fps)
remains the same, that means battery life can be potentially doubled
without significantly affecting system responsiveness.
The overall throughput of the system is, of course, affected in a
negative way (kernel build is approximately 50% slower during this
test), but the goal here is to save power while still maintaining a good
level of responsiveness in the system.
For this reason the low-power mode should be considered only in
emergency conditions, for example when the system is close to completely
run out of power or simply to extend the battery life of a mobile device
without compromising its responsiveness.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
During the initialization phase the scheduler needs to be aware of all
the available CPUs in the system (also those that are offline), in order
to create a proper per-CPU DSQ for all of them.
Otherwise, if some cores are offline, we may get errors like the
following:
swapper/7[0] triggered exit kind 1024:
runtime error (invalid DSQ ID 0x0000000000000007)
Backtrace:
scx_bpf_consume+0xaa/0xd0
bpf_prog_42ff1b9d1ac5b184_rustland_dispatch+0x12b/0x187
Change the code to configure the BpfScheduler object with the total
amount of CPUs available in the system and prevent such failure.
This fixes#280.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Always dispatch at least one task, even if all the CPUs are busy.
This small overcommitment allows to maximize the CPU utilization without
introducing bubbles in the scheduling and also without introducing
regressions in terms of resposiveness.
Before this change the average CPU utilization of a `stress-ng -c 8` on
an 8-cores system is around 95%. With this change applied the CPU
utilization goes up to a consistent 100%.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Add a method to TopologyMap to get the amount of online CPUs.
Considering that most of the schedulers are not handling CPU hotplugging
it can be useful to expose also this metric in addition to the amount of
available CPUs in the system.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Drop the global effective time-slice and use the more fine-grained
per-task time-slice to implement the dynamic time-slice capability.
This allows to reduce the scheduler's overhead (dropping the global time
slice volatile variable shared between user-space and BPF) and it
provides a more fine-grained control on the per-task time slice.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Replace the BPF_MAP_TYPE_QUEUE with a BPF_MAP_TYPE_USER_RINGBUF to store
the tasks dispatched from the user-space scheduler to the BPF component.
This eliminates the need of the bpf() syscalls, significantly reducing
the overhead of the user-space->kernel communication and delivering a
notable performance boost in the overall system throughput.
Based on experimental results, this change allows to reduces the scheduling
overhead by approximately 30-35% when the system is overcommitted.
This improvement has the potential to make user-space schedulers based
on scx_rustland_core viable options for real production systems.
Link: https://github.com/libbpf/libbpf-rs/pull/776
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Provide a command line option to print the version of the scheduler and
the scx_rustland_core crate.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Given that rustland_core now supports task preemption and it has been
tested successfully, it's worhtwhile to cut a new version of the crate.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Looking at perf top it seems that the scheduler can spend a significant
amount of time iterating over the CPU topology/cpumask information,
especially when the system is running a significant amount of tasks:
2.57% scx_rustland [.] <scx_utils::cpumask::CpumaskIntoIterator as core::iter::traits::iterator::Iterator>::next
Considering that scx_rustland doesn't support CPU hotplugging yet (it
requires a full restart to properly handle CPU hotplug events), we can
completely avoid this overhead by caching a TopologyMap object at the
beginning, when the scheduler starts, instead of constantly
re-evaluating the CPU topology information.
This allows to reduce the scheduler overhead by ~5% CPU utilization
under heavy load conditions (from ~65% -> ~60%, according to top).
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
We're currently cloning cpumasks returned by calls to {Core, Cache,
Node, Topology}::span(). If a caller needs to clone it, they can. Let's
not penalize the callers that just want to query the underlying cpumask.
Signed-off-by: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
Provide a run-time option to disable task preemption.
This option can be used to improve the throughput of the CPU-intensive
tasks while still providing a good level of responsiveness in the
system.
By default preemption is enabled, to provide a higher level of
responsiveness to the interactive tasks.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Use the new scx_rustland_core dispatch flag RL_PREEMPT_CPU to allow
interactive tasks to preempt other tasks with scx_rustland.
If the built-in idle selection logic is enforced (option `-i`), the
scheduler prioritizes keeping tasks on the target CPU designated by this
logic. With preemption enabled, these tasks have a higher likelihood of
reusing their cached working set, potentially improving performance.
Alternatively, when tasks are dispatched to the first available CPU
(default behavior), interactive tasks benefit from running more promptly
by kicking out other tasks before their assigned time slice expires.
This potentially allows to increase the default time slice to higher
values in the future, to improve the overall throughput in the system
and, at the same time, still maintain a good level of responsiveness,
because interactive tasks are now able to run pretty much immediately,
independently on the remaining time slice of the other tasks that are
contending the CPUs in the system.
= Results =
Measuring the performance of the usual benchmark "playing a video game
while running a parallel kernel build in background" seems to give
around 2-10% boost in the fps with preemption enabled, depending on the
particular video game.
Results were obtained running a `make -j32` kernel build on a AMD Ryzen
7 5800X 8-Cores 16GB RAM, while testing video games such as Baldur's
Gate 3 (with a solid +10% fps), Counter Strike 2 (around +5%) and Team
Fortress 2 (+2% boost).
Moreover, some WebGL applications (such as
https://webglsamples.org/aquarium/aquarium.html) seem to benefit even
more with preemption enabled, providing up to a +15% fps boost.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Reserve some bits of the `cpu` attribute of a task to store special
dispatch flags.
Initially, let's introduce just RL_CPU_ANY to replace the special value
NO_CPU, indicating that the task can be dispatched on any CPU,
specifically the first CPU that becomes available.
This allows to keep the CPU value assigned by the builtin idle selection
logic, that can potentially be used later for further optimizations.
Moreover, having the possibility to specify dispatch flags gives more
flexibility and it allows to map new scheduling features to such flags.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
As described in https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218109,
https://github.com/sched-ext/scx/issues/147 and
https://github.com/sched-ext/sched_ext/issues/69, AMD chips can
sometimes report fully disabled CPUs as offline, which causes us to
count them when looking at /sys/devices/system/cpu/possible.
Additionally, systems can have holes in their active CPU maps. For
example, a system with CPUs 0, 1, 2, 3 possible, may have only 0 and 2
active. To address this, we need to do a few things:
1. Update topology.rs to be clear that it's returning the number of
_possible_ CPUs in the system. Also update Topology to only record
online CPUs when creating its span and iterating over sysfs when
creating domains. It was previously trying to record when a CPU was
online, but this was actually broken as the topology directory isn't
present in sysfs when the CPU is offline.
2. Schedulers should not be relying on nr_possible_cpus for anything
other than interacting with per-CPU data (e.g. for stats extraction),
or e.g. verifying maximum sizes of statically sized arrays in BPF. It
should _not_ be used for e.g. performing load calculations, etc. With
that said, we'll also need to update schedulers to not rely on the
nr_possible_cpus figure being exported by the topology crate. We do
that for rusty in this patch, but don't fix any of the others other
than updating how they call topology.rs.
3. Account for the fact that LLC IDs may be non-contiguous. For example,
if there is a single core in an LLC, then if we assign LLC IDs to
domains, then the domain IDs won't be contiguous. This doesn't fit
our current model which is used by e.g. infeasible_weights.rs. We'll
update some of the code in rusty to accomodate this, but we'll need
to do more.
4. Update schedulers to properly reset themselves in the event of a
hotplug event. We'll take care of that in a follow-on change.
Signed-off-by: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
We're iterating from min..max cpu in cpus_online(), but that's not
inclusive of the max CPU. Let's also include that so we don't think that
last CPU is offline.
Signed-off-by: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
Most of the schedulers assume that the amount of possible CPUs in the
system represents the actual number of CPUs available.
This is not always true: some CPUs may be offline or certain CPU models
(AMD CPUs for example) may include unavailable CPUs in this number.
This can lead to sub-optimal performance or even errors in the scheduler
(see for example [1][2]).
Ideally, we need to attack this issue in a more generic way, such as
having a proper API provided by a C library, that can be used by all
schedulers and the topology Rust module (scx_utils crate).
But for now, let's try to mitigate most of the common sub-optimal cases
separately inside each scheduler.
For rustland we can apply some mitigations both in select_cpu() (for the
BPF part) and in the user-space part:
- the former is fixed in the sched-ext kernel by commit 94dc0c01b957
("scx: Use cpu_online_mask when resetting idle masks"). However,
adding an extra check `cpu < num_possible_cpus` in select_cpu(),
allows to properly support AMD CPUs, even with kernels that don't
have the cpu_online_mask fix yet (this doesn't always guarantee the
validity of cpu, but it should be enough to mitigate the majority of
the potential sub-optimal cases, without introducing any significant
overhead)
- the latter can be fixed relying on topology.span(), instead of
topology.nr_cpus(), to count the amount of available CPUs in the
system.
[1] https://github.com/sched-ext/sched_ext/issues/69
[2] https://github.com/sched-ext/scx/issues/147
Link: 94dc0c01b9
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
In order to use the new consume_raw() API we need to depend on a version
of libbpf-rs that is not released yet.
Apparently adding such dependency may introduce a potential dependency
conflict with libbpf-sys.
Therefore, revert this change and go back to the previous consume() API.
One a new version of libbpf-rs will be out we can update all our
dependencies to use the new libbpf-rs and re-apply this patch to
scx_rustland_core.
Fixes: 7c8c5fd ("scx_rustland_core: use new consume_raw() libbpf-rs API")
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
