summaryrefslogtreecommitdiffstats
path: root/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.rst
diff options
context:
space:
mode:
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.rst')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.rst81
1 files changed, 81 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.rst b/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.rst
new file mode 100644
index 0000000000..e57ad28301
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+=================
+Scheduler Domains
+=================
+
+Each CPU has a "base" scheduling domain (struct sched_domain). The domain
+hierarchy is built from these base domains via the ->parent pointer. ->parent
+MUST be NULL terminated, and domain structures should be per-CPU as they are
+locklessly updated.
+
+Each scheduling domain spans a number of CPUs (stored in the ->span field).
+A domain's span MUST be a superset of it child's span (this restriction could
+be relaxed if the need arises), and a base domain for CPU i MUST span at least
+i. The top domain for each CPU will generally span all CPUs in the system
+although strictly it doesn't have to, but this could lead to a case where some
+CPUs will never be given tasks to run unless the CPUs allowed mask is
+explicitly set. A sched domain's span means "balance process load among these
+CPUs".
+
+Each scheduling domain must have one or more CPU groups (struct sched_group)
+which are organised as a circular one way linked list from the ->groups
+pointer. The union of cpumasks of these groups MUST be the same as the
+domain's span. The group pointed to by the ->groups pointer MUST contain the CPU
+to which the domain belongs. Groups may be shared among CPUs as they contain
+read only data after they have been set up. The intersection of cpumasks from
+any two of these groups may be non empty. If this is the case the SD_OVERLAP
+flag is set on the corresponding scheduling domain and its groups may not be
+shared between CPUs.
+
+Balancing within a sched domain occurs between groups. That is, each group
+is treated as one entity. The load of a group is defined as the sum of the
+load of each of its member CPUs, and only when the load of a group becomes
+out of balance are tasks moved between groups.
+
+In kernel/sched/core.c, trigger_load_balance() is run periodically on each CPU
+through scheduler_tick(). It raises a softirq after the next regularly scheduled
+rebalancing event for the current runqueue has arrived. The actual load
+balancing workhorse, run_rebalance_domains()->rebalance_domains(), is then run
+in softirq context (SCHED_SOFTIRQ).
+
+The latter function takes two arguments: the runqueue of current CPU and whether
+the CPU was idle at the time the scheduler_tick() happened and iterates over all
+sched domains our CPU is on, starting from its base domain and going up the ->parent
+chain. While doing that, it checks to see if the current domain has exhausted its
+rebalance interval. If so, it runs load_balance() on that domain. It then checks
+the parent sched_domain (if it exists), and the parent of the parent and so
+forth.
+
+Initially, load_balance() finds the busiest group in the current sched domain.
+If it succeeds, it looks for the busiest runqueue of all the CPUs' runqueues in
+that group. If it manages to find such a runqueue, it locks both our initial
+CPU's runqueue and the newly found busiest one and starts moving tasks from it
+to our runqueue. The exact number of tasks amounts to an imbalance previously
+computed while iterating over this sched domain's groups.
+
+Implementing sched domains
+==========================
+
+The "base" domain will "span" the first level of the hierarchy. In the case
+of SMT, you'll span all siblings of the physical CPU, with each group being
+a single virtual CPU.
+
+In SMP, the parent of the base domain will span all physical CPUs in the
+node. Each group being a single physical CPU. Then with NUMA, the parent
+of the SMP domain will span the entire machine, with each group having the
+cpumask of a node. Or, you could do multi-level NUMA or Opteron, for example,
+might have just one domain covering its one NUMA level.
+
+The implementor should read comments in include/linux/sched/sd_flags.h:
+SD_* to get an idea of the specifics and what to tune for the SD flags
+of a sched_domain.
+
+Architectures may override the generic domain builder and the default SD flags
+for a given topology level by creating a sched_domain_topology_level array and
+calling set_sched_topology() with this array as the parameter.
+
+The sched-domains debugging infrastructure can be enabled by enabling
+CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG and adding 'sched_verbose' to your cmdline. If you
+forgot to tweak your cmdline, you can also flip the
+/sys/kernel/debug/sched/verbose knob. This enables an error checking parse of
+the sched domains which should catch most possible errors (described above). It
+also prints out the domain structure in a visual format.