Fix bug: Scheduler's idle-load-balancer not running in first 5 minsafter bootup

From: Diwakar Tundlam
Date: Mon Jan 30 2012 - 13:14:31 EST


We ran into this at Nvidia. QA filed a bug saying coremark_4pthreads scores lower (as if running on 3 cores) when run shortly after bootup. But later its score increases to expected values on 4 cores.

This patch is relevant to linux-2.6.39 but I noticed this fix is not made in linux-3.0, 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3 also.

Please see commit log for more details of the problem and fix.

Thanks,
Diwakar.
Tegra Android Kernel SW Engg.
NVIDIA.
Santa Clara, CA

commit d04d7ef0e3f8c70bd6cd5abb2abc0236aa8d1f7c
Author: Diwakar Tundlam <dtundlam@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed Jan 18 18:58:57 2012 -0800

scheduler: domain: init next_balance in nohz_idle_balancer with jiffies

The next_balance parameter of nohz_idle_balancer should be initialized
to jiffies since jiffies itself is initialized to 300 seconds shy of
overflow. Otherwise, nohz_idle_balancer does not run for the first 5
mins after bootup.

Signed-off-by: Diwakar Tundlam <dtundlam@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Aleksandr Frid <afrid@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Peter Boonstoppel <pboonstoppel@xxxxxxxxxx>
Reviewed-by: Satya Popuri <spopuri@xxxxxxxxxx>

1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

diff --git a/kernel/sched.c b/kernel/sched.c index c5b09f7..506c5da 100644
--- a/kernel/sched.c
+++ b/kernel/sched.c
@@ -8288,6 +8288,7 @@ void __init sched_init(void)
atomic_set(&nohz.load_balancer, nr_cpu_ids);
atomic_set(&nohz.first_pick_cpu, nr_cpu_ids);
atomic_set(&nohz.second_pick_cpu, nr_cpu_ids);
+ nohz.next_balance = jiffies;
#endif
/* May be allocated at isolcpus cmdline parse time */
if (cpu_isolated_map == NULL)
--
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