Commit aceccac5 authored by Mel Gorman's avatar Mel Gorman Committed by Peter Zijlstra
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sched/fair: Enable scheduler feature NEXT_BUDDY



The NEXT_BUDDY feature reinforces wakeup preemption to encourage the last
wakee to be scheduled sooner on the assumption that the waker/wakee share
cache-hot data. In CFS, it was paired with LAST_BUDDY to switch back on
the assumption that the pair of tasks still share data but also relied
on START_DEBIT and the exact WAKEUP_PREEMPTION implementation to get
good results.

NEXT_BUDDY has been disabled since commit 0ec9fab3 ("sched: Improve
latencies and throughput") and LAST_BUDDY was removed in commit 5e963f2b
("sched/fair: Commit to EEVDF"). The reasoning is not clear but as vruntime
spread is mentioned so the expectation is that NEXT_BUDDY had an impact
on overall fairness. It was not noted why LAST_BUDDY was removed but it
is assumed that it's very difficult to reason what LAST_BUDDY's correct
and effective behaviour should be while still respecting EEVDFs goals.
Peter Zijlstra noted during review;

	I think I was just struggling to make sense of things and figured
	less is more and axed it.

	I have vague memories trying to work through the dynamics of
	a wakeup-stack and the EEVDF latency requirements and getting
	a head-ache.

NEXT_BUDDY is easier to reason about given that it's a point-in-time
decision on the wakees deadline and eligibilty relative to the waker. Enable
NEXT_BUDDY as a preparation path to document that the decision to ignore
the current implementation is deliberate. While not presented, the results
were at best neutral and often much more variable.

Signed-off-by: default avatarMel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20251112122521.1331238-2-mgorman@techsingularity.net
parent aaab6bb5
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+1 −1
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -29,7 +29,7 @@ SCHED_FEAT(PREEMPT_SHORT, true)
 * wakeup-preemption), since its likely going to consume data we
 * touched, increases cache locality.
 */
SCHED_FEAT(NEXT_BUDDY, false)
SCHED_FEAT(NEXT_BUDDY, true)

/*
 * Allow completely ignoring cfs_rq->next; which can be set from various