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: [email protected]
Cc: Larry Woodman <[email protected]>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <[email protected]>
Reported-by: Peter Portante <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <[email protected]>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/n/[email protected]
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <[email protected]>

Author: Peter Zijlstra

kernel/sched/fair.c

@@ -3387,6 +3387,14 @@ static int tg_load_down(struct task_group *tg, void *data)
 
 static void update_h_load(long cpu)
 {
+	struct rq *rq = cpu_rq(cpu);
+	unsigned long now = jiffies;
+
+	if (rq->h_load_throttle == now)
+		return;
+
+	rq->h_load_throttle = now;
+
 	rcu_read_lock();
 	walk_tg_tree(tg_load_down, tg_nop, (void *)cpu);
 	rcu_read_unlock();
@@ -4293,11 +4301,10 @@ static int load_balance(int this_cpu, struct rq *this_rq,
 		env.src_rq    = busiest;
 		env.loop_max  = min(sysctl_sched_nr_migrate, busiest->nr_running);
 
+		update_h_load(env.src_cpu);
 more_balance:
 		local_irq_save(flags);
 		double_rq_lock(this_rq, busiest);
-		if (!env.loop)
-			update_h_load(env.src_cpu);
 
 		/*
 		 * cur_ld_moved - load moved in current iteration

kernel/sched/sched.h

@@ -374,7 +374,11 @@ struct rq {
 #ifdef CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED
 	/* list of leaf cfs_rq on this cpu: */
 	struct list_head leaf_cfs_rq_list;
-#endif
+#ifdef CONFIG_SMP
+	unsigned long h_load_throttle;
+#endif /* CONFIG_SMP */
+#endif /* CONFIG_FAIR_GROUP_SCHED */
+
 #ifdef CONFIG_RT_GROUP_SCHED
 	struct list_head leaf_rt_rq_list;
 #endif