Mel Gorman did some nice work in 9fe1f127 ("sched/fair: Merge
select_idle_core/cpu()"), resulting in the kernel being more efficient
at finding an idle CPU, and in tasks spending less time waiting to be
run, both according to the schedstats run_delay numbers, and according
to measured application latencies. Yay.

The flip side of this is that we see more task migrations (about 30%
more), higher cache misses, higher memory bandwidth utilization, and
higher CPU use, for the same number of requests/second.

This is most pronounced on a memcache type workload, which saw a
consistent 1-3% increase in total CPU use on the system, due to those
increased task migrations leading to higher L2 cache miss numbers, and
higher memory utilization. The exclusive L3 cache on Skylake does us
no favors there.

On our web serving workload, that effect is usually negligible.

It appears that the increased number of CPU migrations is generally a
good thing, since it leads to lower cpu_delay numbers, reflecting the
fact that tasks get to run faster. However, the reduced locality and
the corresponding increase in L2 cache misses hurts a little.

The patch below appears to fix the regression, while keeping the
benefit of the lower cpu_delay numbers, by reintroducing
select_idle_smt with a twist: when a socket has no idle cores, check
to see if the sibling of "prev" is idle, before searching all the
other CPUs.

This fixes both the occasional 9% regression on the web serving
workload, and the continuous 2% CPU use regression on the memcache
type workload.

With Mel's patches and this patch together, task migrations are still
high, but L2 cache misses, memory bandwidth, and CPU time used are
back down to what they were before. The p95 and p99 response times for
the memcache type application improve by about 10% over what they were
before Mel's patches got merged.
Signed-off-by: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@techsingularity.net>
Acked-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20210326151932.2c187840@imladris.surriel.com