sched/loadavg: Avoid loadavg spikes caused by delayed NO_HZ accounting
authorMatt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>
Fri, 17 Feb 2017 12:07:30 +0000 (12:07 +0000)
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Thu, 16 Mar 2017 08:21:00 +0000 (09:21 +0100)
commit6e5f32f7a43f45ee55c401c0b9585eb01f9629a8
tree7618f32240ecf296ff5cae88248511c4df742fa1
parentdcc3b5ffe1b32771c9a22e2c916fb94c4fcf5b79
sched/loadavg: Avoid loadavg spikes caused by delayed NO_HZ accounting

If we crossed a sample window while in NO_HZ we will add LOAD_FREQ to
the pending sample window time on exit, setting the next update not
one window into the future, but two.

This situation on exiting NO_HZ is described by:

  this_rq->calc_load_update < jiffies < calc_load_update

In this scenario, what we should be doing is:

  this_rq->calc_load_update = calc_load_update      [ next window ]

But what we actually do is:

  this_rq->calc_load_update = calc_load_update + LOAD_FREQ   [ next+1 window ]

This has the effect of delaying load average updates for potentially
up to ~9seconds.

This can result in huge spikes in the load average values due to
per-cpu uninterruptible task counts being out of sync when accumulated
across all CPUs.

It's safe to update the per-cpu active count if we wake between sample
windows because any load that we left in 'calc_load_idle' will have
been zero'd when the idle load was folded in calc_global_load().

This issue is easy to reproduce before,

  commit 9d89c257dfb9 ("sched/fair: Rewrite runnable load and utilization average tracking")

just by forking short-lived process pipelines built from ps(1) and
grep(1) in a loop. I'm unable to reproduce the spikes after that
commit, but the bug still seems to be present from code review.

Signed-off-by: Matt Fleming <matt@codeblueprint.co.uk>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <umgwanakikbuti@gmail.com>
Cc: Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>
Fixes: commit 5167e8d ("sched/nohz: Rewrite and fix load-avg computation -- again")
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20170217120731.11868-2-matt@codeblueprint.co.uk
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
kernel/sched/loadavg.c