Re: [PATCH] sched/topology: Improve load balancing on AMD EPYC

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Wed Jun 05 2019 - 14:05:00 EST


On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 04:59:22PM +0100, Matt Fleming wrote:
> SD_BALANCE_{FORK,EXEC} and SD_WAKE_AFFINE are stripped in sd_init()
> for any sched domains with a NUMA distance greater than 2 hops
> (RECLAIM_DISTANCE). The idea being that it's expensive to balance
> across domains that far apart.
>
> However, as is rather unfortunately explained in
>
> commit 32e45ff43eaf ("mm: increase RECLAIM_DISTANCE to 30")
>
> the value for RECLAIM_DISTANCE is based on node distance tables from
> 2011-era hardware.
>
> Current AMD EPYC machines have the following NUMA node distances:
>
> node distances:
> node 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
> 0: 10 16 16 16 32 32 32 32
> 1: 16 10 16 16 32 32 32 32
> 2: 16 16 10 16 32 32 32 32
> 3: 16 16 16 10 32 32 32 32
> 4: 32 32 32 32 10 16 16 16
> 5: 32 32 32 32 16 10 16 16
> 6: 32 32 32 32 16 16 10 16
> 7: 32 32 32 32 16 16 16 10
>
> where 2 hops is 32.
>
> The result is that the scheduler fails to load balance properly across
> NUMA nodes on different sockets -- 2 hops apart.
>

> Update the code in sd_init() to account for modern node distances, and
> maintaining backward-compatible behaviour by respecting
> RECLAIM_DISTANCE for distances more than 2 hops.

And then we had two magic values :/

Should we not 'fix' RECLAIM_DISTANCE for EPYC or something? Because
surely, if we want to load-balance agressively over 30, then so too
should we do node_reclaim() I'm thikning.