search for a thread to steal inside a critical section. Since this
allows the search to be preempted, restart the search if preemption
happens since the search results found earlier may no longer be
valid.
Decrease the latency of starting a thread that may be assigned to
this CPU during the search by polling for incoming threads during
the search and switching to that thread instead of continuing the
search.
Test for stale search results and restart the search before going
through the expense of calling tdq_lock_pair(). Retry some tests
after grabbing the locks since things may have changed while waiting
to get both locks.
Eliminate special case handling for stealing from an SMT peer that
uses 1 as the steal threshold. This can only succeed if a thread
has been assigned but our SMT peer has not yet started executing
it. This is quite rare and when it happens the other SMT thread
is generally waiting for the same tdq lock that we hold. Basically
both SMT threads are racing to grab the same spin lock.
Add the kern.sched.always_steal knob from a ULE patch by jeff@.
Incorporate another idea from Jeff's ULE patch. If the sched_switch()
detects that the CPU is about to go idle, try to steal a thread
before switching to the idle thread. Since the search for a thread
to steal has to be done inside a critical section in this context,
limit the impact on latency by adding the knob kern.sched.trysteal_limit
to limit the topological distance of the search and don't restart
the search if we detect stale results. If this search can't find
an stealable thread, the idle loop can do a more complete search.
Also poll for threads being assigned to this CPU during the search
and switch to them instead of continuing the search. This change
is responsibile for the majority of the improvement in parallel
buildworld times.
In sched_balance_group() change the minimum threshold from stealing
a thread from 1 to 2. Poaching a newly assigned thread from a CPU
that is waking up hasn't yet switched to that thread from idle is
likely very rare and is likely to have the same lock race as is
seen when stealing threads in the idle loop. Also use tdq_notify()
to kick the destintation CPU instead of always sending an IPI.
Update a stale comment, the number of transferable threads is not
calculated.
Reviewed by: kib (earlier version)
Comments by: avg, jeff, mav
MFC after: 1 month
Differential Revision: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D12130
97e9382d56