Re: [ANNOUNCE] BLD-3.17 release.

[Mike Galbraith <umgwanakikbuti@gmail.com>]

On Mon, 2014-10-13 at 21:14 +0600, Rakib Mullick wrote:

> Okay. From the numbers above it's apparent that BLD isn't doing good,
> atleast for the
> kind of system that you have been using. I didn't had a chance to ran
> it on any kind of
> NUMA systems, for that reason on Kconfig, I've marked it as "Not
> suitable for NUMA", yet.

(yeah, a NUMA box would rip itself to shreds)

> Part of the reason is, I didn't manage to try it out myself and other
> reason is, it's easy to
> get things wrong if schedule domains are build improperly. I'm not
> sure what was the
> sched configuration in your case. BLD assumes (or kindof bliendly
> believes systems
> default sched domain topology) on wakeup tasks are cache hot and so
> don't put those
> task's on other sched domains, but if that isn't the case then perhaps
> it'll miss out on
> balancing oppourtunity, in that case CPU utilization will be improper.

Even when you have only one socket with a big L3, you don't really want
to bounce fast/light tasks around too frequently, L2 misses still hurt.

> Can you please share the perf stat of netperf runs? So, far I have
> seen reduced context
> switch numbers with -BLD with a drawback of huge increase of CPU
> migration numbers.

No need, it's L2 misses.  Q6600 has no L3 to mitigate the miss pain.

> But, the kind of systems I ran so far, it deemed too much CPU movement
> didn't cost much.
> But, it could be wrong for NUMA systems.

You can most definitely move even very fast/light tasks too much within
an L3, L2 misses can demolish throughput.  We had that problem.

-Mike