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From:   Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>
Date:   Fri, 4 Dec 2020 14:13:08 +0100
Message-ID: <CAKfTPtDRqwUoX51rU0Xd3H9Dwqf8bLAFBxhoeMF1brKYmAZDJg@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 06/10] sched/fair: Clear the target CPU from the cpumask
 of CPUs searched
To:     Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Cc:     LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Aubrey Li <aubrey.li@linux.intel.com>,
        Barry Song <song.bao.hua@hisilicon.com>,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>,
        Peter Ziljstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@redhat.com>,
        Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@arm.com>,
        Linux-ARM <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>
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On Fri, 4 Dec 2020 at 12:30, Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 04, 2020 at 11:56:36AM +0100, Vincent Guittot wrote:
> > > The intent was that the sibling might still be an idle candidate. In
> > > the current draft of the series, I do not even clear this so that the
> > > SMT sibling is considered as an idle candidate. The reasoning is that if
> > > there are no idle cores then an SMT sibling of the target is as good an
> > > idle CPU to select as any.
> >
> > Isn't the purpose of select_idle_smt ?
> >
>
> Only in part.
>
> > select_idle_core() looks for an idle core and opportunistically saves
> > an idle CPU candidate to skip select_idle_cpu. In this case this is
> > useless loops for select_idle_core() because we are sure that the core
> > is not idle
> >
>
> If select_idle_core() finds an idle candidate other than the sibling,
> it'll use it if there is no idle core -- it picks a busy sibling based
> on a linear walk of the cpumask. Similarly, select_idle_cpu() is not

My point is that it's a waste of time to loop the sibling cpus of
target in select_idle_core because it will not help to find an idle
core. The sibling  cpus will then be check either by select_idle_cpu
of select_idle_smt

> guaranteed to scan the sibling first (ordering) or even reach the sibling
> (throttling). select_idle_smt() is a last-ditch effort.
>
> --
> Mel Gorman
> SUSE Labs