Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 25 Nov 2016 17:13:36 +0100 | From | Peter Zijlstra <> | Subject | Re: RFC: documentation of the autogroup feature [v2] |
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On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 05:04:56PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote: > That is; the whole thing > becomes, where l denotes the level in the hierarchy and i an > entity on that level: > > l w_g,i > dt_l,i = dt \Prod ---------- > g=0 \Sum w_g,j > > > Or more concretely, for E: > > w_E > dt_1,E = dt_0,C ----------- > (w_E + w_F) > > w_C w_E > = dt ----------------------- ----------- > (w_A + w_B + w_C + w_D) (w_E + w_F) >
And this also immediately shows one of the 'problems' with it. Since we don't have floating point in kernel, these fractions are evaluated with fixed-point arithmetic. Traditionally (and on 32bit) we use 10bit fixed point, recently we switched to 20bit for 64bit machines.
That change is what bit you on the nice testing.
But it also means that once we run out of fractional bits things go wobbly. The fractions, as per the above, increase the deeper the group hierarchy goes but are also affected by the number of CPUs in the system (not immediately represented in that equation).
Not to mention that many scheduler operations become O(depth) in cost, which also hurts. An obvious example being task selection, we pick a runnable entity for each level, until the resulting entity has no further children (iow. is a task).
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