BFS 502, linux-4.7-ck5

With the fix for the last of the freezes with BFS497 becoming clearer and a number of other minor issues being attended to, such as build failures and minor improvements accumulating, I'm releasing a new BFS that combines all into yet another release, which should be the last of the releases for the 4.7 kernel.

BFS by itself:
4.7-sched-bfs-502.patch

-ck patches with BFS:
4.7-ck5

In addition to the update to BFS, this -ck release is the first in a very long time to include a patch from another developer - the Throttled background buffered writeback v7 patch by Jens Axboe. This makes a massive difference to a system's ability to read files, open new applications etc. under heavy write loads in my testing and is a change which I believe is essential and will eventually make its way into the mainline kernel.

The changes to BFS 502 are as follows:

bfs497-build_other_arches.patch
bfs497-no_smtload_avg.patch
bfs497-recognise_nodes2.patch
bfs497-revert-othercpufreq.patch
bfs497-fix_smt_nonice.patch  

• A build fix for building on other architectures (notably ARM).
• Simplifying the load measurement on SMT machines reported to cpufreq - trying to account for load on the SMT sibling is unnecessary as each core will run at the speed of the most loaded sibling anyway on any existing hardware.
• A fix for detecting CPUs on other NUMA nodes and setting their locality correctly.
• Not trying to signal CPU load to cpufreq on other CPUs when tasks migrate - this was leading to the hangs and there is enough rescheduling for cpufreq to get the load later on.
• A build fix for when SMT_NICE is not configured.

Enjoy!
お楽しみ下さい
-ck

BFS 497, linux-4.7-ck4

For the first time in a very long time, I'm announcing yet another -ck release up to ck4 along with yet more substantial updates for BFS for linux-4.7 based kernels.

BFS by itself:
4.7-sched-bfs-497.patch

-ck branded linux-4.7-ck4 patches:
linux-4.7-ck4

Thanks(?) to the massive changes to the mainline kernel I'd been forced to rewrite significant components of BFS to work properly with them, specifically the cpu frequency governors. At the same time I've had quite a bit of energy and enthusiasm for working on BFS in a way I haven't had in a long time. As a result, this updated version not only addresses the remaining cgroup stub patch bug (mentioned on the previous announcement) but implements further improvements and clean ups to go with those improvements.

Alas I still have no explanation for the random lockups some people are seeing, but I have seen reports of it happening on mainline kernels as well now, so while I'm always suspicious of my own code, there is also the chance that BFS exacerbates an issue in mainline. Something that appears common is onboard Intel graphics with the Haswell chipset.

Additionally I had reports of people being unable to suspend with BFS from 4.7 but I haven't heard back from them on later versions.

The short summary of improvements in this version are less overhead, higher throughput and less latencies.

I've rewritten the skiplist implementation to not require a malloc/free on insertion/removal of a new node which seemed to noticeably improve throughput at high loads.
Now that CPU frequency governors know what the scheduler is doing, the approach of BFS of old of knowing what the governor was doing and working around it is no longer helpful and I've removed the whole sticky task and offset for throttled CPUs and throughput has actually improved instead.
I've also added some micro-optimisations and cleanups.
I've added a minor change for offlining CPUs to prevent tasks trying to schedule to them.

The set of patches in ck4 is the largest in the ck patchset since the early 2.6 patchset days. I've also included the patch from Alfred (thanks!) to fix the warning that happens with suspend which is mostly harmless.

Each patch included has a mini changelog at the top.

I'm also keen to get feedback from people on if they see any noticeable interactive/responsiveness regressions by disabling the interactive flag as follows:

echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/interactive

Enjoy!
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-ck

BFS 490, linux-4.7-ck3

Announcing yet another substantial update for BFS for linux-4.7 based kernels.

BFS by itself:
4.7-sched-bfs-490.patch

-ck branded linux-4.7-ck3 patches:
linux-4.7-ck3

Following on from the large update to BFS in 480 to skip lists, numerous regressions became apparent, the bulk of which were related to doing a poor job of signalling cpu load to the various cpufrequency governors. Some were affected badly, others not so, but there were plenty of helpful people giving feedback about those regressions which encouraged me to slowly but surely chip away at the problems. Additionally, there were some minor behavioural regressions which were oversights during the updates to BFS 480. Finally the rudimentary cgroup stub patch would crash the system.

As the number of patches required to address these issues got larger and larger, it became hard for people on this blog to keep up with the changes so I've released 490 which hopefully should address the bulk of these issues - there are patches in there that haven't been posted on this blog, but I've included all of them with a brief description in the incremental/ directory for your perusal.

Anyway it is much easier for people to grab the latest version which includes all of those changes, including the updated cgroups stub patch.

EDIT: Here's a patch to make cgroup stubs safer cgroup-stubs-safe2.patch

Enjoy!
お楽しみ下さい
-ck

Cgroup stubs for BFS

In addition to some minor pending changes for BFS 480 here:

Pending

I've implemented basic stubs for the CPU controller cgroups feature. This patch is experimental and does NOT implement the actual controller groups features, it simply creates a compatibility layer for the cgroup filesystem. The point of this is to allow environments and applications that refuse to work (such as docker), or work improperly without them, to work. While the actual control of CPU resources won't happen, there's a good chance that it won't make any difference whatsoever since their actual use on a desktop filesystem is serious overkill and worsens throughput. I don't have any plans to implement the actual CPU groups features. This is only lightly tested but already I've noticed that a laptop that would always take ages to shutdown with BFS is now much happier, so who knows it might help machines that refuse to suspend for the same reason:

bfs480-cgroup-stubs.patch

As an aside I did an experiment today with BFS480 on a machine with 12 logical cores and 64GB ram and ran a make -j allyesconfig at sched idleprio to see how it would scale and control the many idleprio tasks along with SMT nice. The machine was fine right up until it ran out of ram and then stalled while it evicted whatever it could and then continued. The load peaked and stayed around 7200 for 10 minutes. While the load was 7200, existing applications continued to work fine and browsing on firefox was virtually normal, but starting new applications took forever thanks to seriously delayed I/O.

EDIT: More testing shows this patch is UNSTABLE and can crash so just see it as proof-of-concept for now

Enjoy!
お楽しみ下さい
-ck