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Subject: Re: Gang scheduling
To:     Tim Chen <tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Cc:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
References: <44347e72-d595-5c2d-3983-7237526c71c6@oracle.com>
 <c08136ad-3e68-ce1c-af03-b591acc582fc@linux.intel.com>
From:   Subhra Mazumdar <subhra.mazumdar@oracle.com>
Message-ID: <cc445d4f-8532-cd38-08ed-0a70f2cb40a1@oracle.com>
Date:   Mon, 15 Oct 2018 15:49:14 -0700
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On 10/12/2018 11:01 AM, Tim Chen wrote:
> On 10/10/2018 05:09 PM, Subhra Mazumdar wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I was following the Coscheduling patch discussion on lkml and Peter mentioned he had a patch series. I found the following on github.
>>
>> https://github.com/pdxChen/gang/commits/sched_1.23-loadbal
>>
>> I would like to test this with KVMs. Are the commits from 38d5acb to f019876 sufficient? Also is there any documentaion on how to use it (any knobs I need to turn on for gang scheduling to happen?) or is it enabled by default for KVMs?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Subhra
>>
> I would suggest you try
> https://github.com/pdxChen/gang/tree/sched_1.23-base
> without the load balancing part of gang scheduling.
> It is enabled by default for KVMs.
>
> Due to the constant change in gang scheduling status of the QEMU thread
> depending on whether vcpu is loaded or unloaded,
> the load balancing part of the code doesn't work very well.
Thanks. Does this mean each vcpu thread need to be affinitized to a cpu?
>
> The current version of the code need to be optimized further.  Right now
> the QEMU thread constantly does vcpu load and unload during VM enter and exit.
> We gang schedule only after vcpu load and register the thread to be gang
> scheduled.  When we do vcpu unload, the thread is removed from the set
> to be gang scheduled.  Each time there's a synchronization with the
> sibling thread that's expensive.
>
> However, for QEMU, there's a one to one correspondence between the QEMU
> thread and vcpu.  So we don't have to change the gang scheduling status
> for such thread to avoid the church and sync with the sibling. That should
> be helpful for VM with lots of I/O causing constant VM exits.  We're
> still working on this optimization.  And the load balancing should be
> better after this change.
>
> Tim
>

Also FYI I get the following error while building sched_1.23-base:

ERROR: "sched_ttwu_pending" [arch/x86/kvm/kvm-intel.ko] undefined!
scripts/Makefile.modpost:92: recipe for target '__modpost' failed

Adding the following fixed it:

diff --git a/kernel/sched/core.c b/kernel/sched/core.c
index 46807dc..302b77d 100644
--- a/kernel/sched/core.c
+++ b/kernel/sched/core.c
@@ -21,6 +21,7 @@
  #include <trace/events/sched.h>

  DEFINE_PER_CPU_SHARED_ALIGNED(struct rq, runqueues);
+EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(sched_ttwu_pending);

  #if defined(CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG) && defined(HAVE_JUMP_LABEL)
  /*