Re: [PATCH v2 3/3] sched/fair: fix unnecessary increase of balance interval

[Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@arm.com>]

On 18/12/2018 09:32, Vincent Guittot wrote:
[...]
> In this asym packing case, It has nothing to do with pinned tasks and
> that's the root cause of the problem:
> the active balance triggered by asym packing is wrongly assumed to be
> an active balance due to pinned task(s) and the load balance interval
> is increased without any reason
> 
[...]> hmm the increase of balance interval is not linked to cpu stopper but
> to increase the load balance interval when we know that there is no
> possible load balance to perform
> 
> Regards,
> Vincent

Ah, I think I get it: you're saying that this balance_interval increase
is done because it is always assumed we do an active balance with
busiest->nr_running > 1 && pinned tasks, and that all that is left to
migrate after the active_balance is pinned tasks that we can't actually
migrate.

Maybe that's what we should target (as always, totally untested):

-----8<-----
@@ -9131,18 +9144,16 @@ static int load_balance(int this_cpu, struct rq *this_rq,
        } else
                sd->nr_balance_failed = 0;
 
-       if (likely(!active_balance)) {
-               /* We were unbalanced, so reset the balancing interval */
-               sd->balance_interval = sd->min_interval;
-       } else {
+       if (unlikely(active_balance && (env.flags & LBF_ALL_PINNED))) {
                /*
-                * If we've begun active balancing, start to back off. This
-                * case may not be covered by the all_pinned logic if there
-                * is only 1 task on the busy runqueue (because we don't call
-                * detach_tasks).
+                * We did an active balance as a last resort (all other tasks
+                * were pinned), start to back off.
                 */
                if (sd->balance_interval < sd->max_interval)
                        sd->balance_interval *= 2;
+       } else {
+               /* We were unbalanced, so reset the balancing interval */
+               sd->balance_interval = sd->min_interval;
        }
 
        goto out;
----->8-----

can_migrate_task() called by detach_tasks() in the
'if (busiest->nr_running > 1)' block should clear that LBF_ALL_PINNED flag
if there is any migratable task (even if we don't end up migrating it),
and it's not set if (busiest->nr_running == 1), so that *should* work.

I believe the argument that this applies to all kinds of active balances
is still valid - this shouldn't be changed just for asym packing active
balance.