Since scx_rustland_core enables setting a time slice on a per-task basis
during task dispatch, there's no need to maintain a global time slice in
the BPF component. Instead, a global time slice can simply be managed in
user-space, achieving the same outcome.
Therefore, drop the global slice_us property from BpfScheduler to
simplify the API.
NOTE: if a time slice is not specified for a task, SCX_SLICE_DFL will be
used by default.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
Add more comments to make the source code more understandable, so that
it can be easily used as a template for implementing more complex
scheduling policies.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
The update_tasks() API is somewhat confusing, so replace it with a
clearer API, notify_complete().
This new API will return control to the BPF component and inform it
about the number of tasks still pending in the user-space scheduler.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
The low-power API is a bit of a hack implemented purely in the BPF
layer, this should be better re-implemented with some concepts of
topology awareness.
Therefore, get rid of this API for now.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
The current API used to notify the user-space scheduler when a task
exits is really confusing (setting a negative value in
queued_task_ctx.cpu), and it's also possible to detect task exiting
events from user-space (or check in procfs, even if it's slower).
In any case, a better API should be provided for this, so drop the
current one for now.
NOTE: this will cause additional memory usage for scx_rustland, but it
can be fixed/addressed later in a separate commit (i.e., providing a
periodic garbage collector for the unused task entries).
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
Allow user-space scheduler to pick an idle CPU via
self.bpf.select_cpu(pid, prev_task, flags), mimicking the BPF's
select_cpu() iterface.
Also remove the full_user option and always rely on the idle selection
logic from user-space.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
Re-add the partial mode option that was dropped during the refactoring.
The partial option allows to apply the scheduler only to the tasks which
have their scheduling policy set to SCHED_EXT via sched_setscheduler().
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
The API for determining which PID is running on a specific CPU is racy
and is unnecessary since this information can be obtained from user
space.
Additionally, it's not reliable for identifying idle CPUs. Therefore,
it's better to remove this API and, in the future, provide a cpumask
alternative that can export the idle state of the CPUs to user space.
As a consequence also change scx_rustland to dispatch one task a time,
instead of dispatching tasks in batches of idle cores (that are usually
not accurate due to the racy nature of the CPU ownership interaface).
Dispatching one task at a time even makes the scheduler more performant,
due to the vruntime scheduling being applied to more tasks sitting in
the scheduler's queue.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
Use the same idle selection logic used in scx_bpfland also in
scx_rustland_core.
Also drop fifo_mode and always use the BPF idle selection logic by
default as long as the system is not saturated, unless full_user is
specified.
This approach allows user-space schedulers aiming for maximum
performance to leverage the BPF idle selection logic (bypassing
user-space), while those seeking full control can enable full_user to
bypass the BPF CPU idle selection logic and choose the target CPU for
each task from user-space.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
We don't need to send the number of voluntary context switches (nvcsw)
from BPF to user-space, as this information is already accessible in
user-space via procfs. Sending this data would only create unnecessary
overhead for schedulers that don't require it, and those that do can
easily retrieve it through procfs.
Therefore, drop this metric from scx_rustland_core and change
scx_rustland implementing an interactive task classifier fully in the
user-space part of the scheduler.
Also drop some options that are not provide any significant benefit
(also in preparation of a bigger refactoring to define a better API for
the user-space framework).
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@linux.dev>
Update libbpf-rs & libbpf-cargo to 0.24. Among other things, generated
skeletons now contain directly accessible map and program objects, no
longer necessitating the use of accessor methods. As a result, the risk
for mutability conflicts is reduced greatly.
Signed-off-by: Daniel Müller <deso@posteo.net>
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.
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 scx_rlfifo, we're currently using topo.nr_cpus_possible() to
determine how many possible CPU IDs we could have on the system. To
properly support systems whose disabled CPUs may be in the middle of the
range of possible CPU IDs, let's instead use topo.nr_cpu_ids() so that
we don't accidentally dispatch to an invalid DSQ.
Signed-off-by: David Vernet <void@manifault.com>
With commit 786ec0c0 ("scx_rlfifo: schedule all tasks in user-space")
all the scheduling decisions are now happening in user-space. This also
bypasses the built-in idle selection logic, delegating the CPU selection
for each task to the user-space scheduler.
The easiest way to distribute tasks across the available CPUs is to
simply allow to dispatch them on the first CPU available.
In this way the scheduler becomes usable in practical scenarios and at
the same time it also maintains its simplicity.
This allows to spread all tasks across all the available CPUs
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Disable all the BPF optimization shortcuts by default and force all
tasks to be processed by the user-space scheduler.
Given that the primary goal of this scheduler is to offer a
straightforward and intuitive example for experimental purposes, this
change simplifies the process for individuals looking to experiment,
allowing them to apply changes to user-space code and quickly observe
the effects, without dealing with any in-kernel optimizations.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
No functional change, just add some comments to better describe the
parameters used when initializing the main BpfScheduler object.
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.
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>
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>
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>
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>
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>
scx_rlfifo is provided as a simple example to show how to use
scx_rustland_core and it's not supposed to be used in a real production
environment.
To prevent performance bug reports print an explicit warning when it's
started to clarify the goal of this scheduler.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Small improvement to make the scheduler a bit more responsive, without
introducing too much complexity or too much CPU overhead.
This can be achieved by replacing a sleep of 1ms with a sched_yield()
every time that the scheduler has finished to dispatch all the queued
tasks.
This also makes the code a bit smaller and easier to read.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Provide distinct methods to set the target CPU and the per-task time
slice to dispatched tasks.
Moreover, also provide a constructor to create a DispatchedTask from a
QueuedTask (this allows to automatically bounce a task from the
scheduler to the BPF dispatcher without having to take care of setting
the individual task's attributes).
This also allows to make most of the attributes of DispatchedTask
private, especially it allows to hide cpumask_cnt, that should be only
used internally between the BPF and the user-space component.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
Provide a way to set a different time slice per-task, by adding a new
attribute slice_ns to the DispatchedTask struct.
This attribute determines the time slice assigned to the task, if it is
set to 0 then the global time slice (either the default one or the
effective one, if set) will be used.
At the same time, remove the payload attribute, that is basically unused
(scx_rustland uses it to send the task's vruntime to the BPF dispatcher
for debugging purposes, but it's not very useful anymore at this point).
In the future we may introduce a proper interface to attach a custom
payload to each task with a proper interface.
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
This is to potentinally reduce issues with folks
using different versions of libbpf at runtime.
This also:
- makes static linking of libbpf the default
- adds steps in `meson setup` to fetch libbpf and make it
There is no need to generate source code in a temporary directory with
RustLandBuilder(), we can simply generate code in-tree and exclude the
generated source files from .gitignore.
Having the generated source files in-tree can help to debug potential
build issues (and it also allows to drop the the tempfile crate
dependency).
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <andrea.righi@canonical.com>
