Re: Time slice for SCHED_BATCH ( CFS)

[Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>]

On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 11:17 +0530, J K Rai wrote:
> 
> May I have little more clarification on this:
>  
> latency := 20ms * (1 + log2(nr_cpus))
> min_granularity := 4ms * (1 + log2(nr_cpus))
> nr_latency := floor(latency / min_granularity)
> 
> 1) In above the 20ms and 4 ms seems to be the default values of
> sched_latency_ns and sched_min_granularity_ns, that means if we change
> them thru sysctl -w then we should keep those changed values in the
> above relationship in place of 20ms and 4 ms. Am I correct?

Yes, sysctl setting replaces the whole expression, that is, including
the log2 cpu factor.

> 2) What exactly or tentatively  we signify by latency, min_granularity
> and nr_latency?

latency -- the desired scheduling latency of applications on low/medium
load machines (20ms is around the human observable).

min_granularity -- since we let slices get smaller the more tasks there
are in roughly: latency/nr_running fashion, we want to avoid them
getting too small. min_granularity provides a lower bound.

nr_latency -- the cut off point where we let go of the desired
scheduling latency and start growing linearly.

>         latency ; nr_running <= nr_latency
> period = {
>           nr_running * min_granularity ; nr_running > nr_latency
> 
> slice = task_weight * period / runqueue_weight
> 
> 
> 3) Here in above, what is meant by task_weight and runqueue_weight ?

Since CFS is a proportional weight scheduler, each task is assigned a
relative weight. Two tasks with weight 1 will get similar amounts of cpu
time, a weight ratio of 1:2 will get the former task half as much cpu
time as the latter.

The runqueue weight is the sum of all task weights.

> Load-balancing of course makes this an even more interesting thing.
> 
> 4) Can we say something more about load-balancing effect on
> time-slice. 
> How the load-balancing works at present, is it by making the trees of
> equal hight / no of elements?

Well, load balancing just moves tasks around trying to ensure the sum of
weights on each cpu is roughly equal, the slice calculation is done with
whatever is present on a single cpu.