xen: sched_credit: improve tickling of idle CPUs

Right now, when a VCPU wakes-up, we check whether it should preempt
what is running on the PCPU, and whether or not the waking VCPU can
be migrated (by tickling some idlers). However, this can result in
suboptimal or even wrong behaviour, as explained here:

 http://lists.xen.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2012-10/msg01732.html

This change, instead, when deciding which PCPU(s) to tickle, upon
VCPU wake-up, considers both what it is likely to happen on the PCPU
where the wakeup occurs,and whether or not there are idlers where
the woken-up VCPU can run. In fact, if there are, we can avoid
interrupting the running VCPU. Only in case there aren't any of
these PCPUs, preemption and migration are the way to go.

This has been tested (on top of the previous change) by running
the following benchmarks inside 2, 6 and 10 VMs, concurrently, on
a shared host, each with 2 VCPUs and 960 MB of memory (host had 16
ways and 12 GB RAM).

1) All VMs had 'cpus="all"' in their config file.

$ sysbench --test=cpu ... (time, lower is better)
 | VMs | w/o this change         | w/ this change          |
 | 2   | 50.078467 +/- 1.6676162 | 49.673667 +/- 0.0094321 |
 | 6   | 63.259472 +/- 0.1137586 | 61.680011 +/- 1.0208723 |
 | 10  | 91.246797 +/- 0.1154008 | 90.396720 +/- 1.5900423 |
$ sysbench --test=memory ... (throughput, higher is better)
 | VMs | w/o this change         | w/ this change          |
 | 2   | 485.56333 +/- 6.0527356 | 487.83167 +/- 0.7602850 |
 | 6   | 401.36278 +/- 1.9745916 | 409.96778 +/- 3.6761092 |
 | 10  | 294.43933 +/- 0.8064945 | 302.49033 +/- 0.2343978 |
$ specjbb2005 ... (throughput, higher is better)
 | VMs | w/o this change         | w/ this change          |
 | 2   | 43150.63 +/- 1359.5616  | 43275.427 +/- 606.28185 |
 | 6   | 29274.29 +/- 1024.4042  | 29716.189 +/- 1290.1878 |
 | 10  | 19061.28 +/- 512.88561  | 19192.599 +/- 605.66058 |


2) All VMs had their VCPUs statically pinned to the host's PCPUs.

$ sysbench --test=cpu ... (time, lower is better)
 | VMs | w/o this change         | w/ this change          |
 | 2   | 47.8211   +/- 0.0215504 | 47.826900 +/- 0.0077872 |
 | 6   | 62.689122 +/- 0.0877173 | 62.764539 +/- 0.3882493 |
 | 10  | 90.321097 +/- 1.4803867 | 89.974570 +/- 1.1437566 |
$ sysbench --test=memory ... (throughput, higher is better)
 | VMs | w/o this change         | w/ this change          |
 | 2   | 550.97667 +/- 2.3512355 | 550.87000 +/- 0.8140792 |
 | 6   | 443.15000 +/- 5.7471797 | 454.01056 +/- 8.4373466 |
 | 10  | 313.89233 +/- 1.3237493 | 321.81167 +/- 0.3528418 |
$ specjbb2005 ... (throughput, higher is better)
 | 2   | 49591.057 +/- 952.93384 | 49594.195 +/- 799.57976 |
 | 6   | 33538.247 +/- 1089.2115 | 33671.758 +/- 1077.6806 |
 | 10  | 21927.870 +/- 831.88742 | 21891.131 +/- 563.37929 |


Numbers show how the change has either no or very limited impact
(specjbb2005 case) or, when it does have some impact, that is a
real improvement in performances (sysbench-memory case).

Signed-off-by: Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@citrix.com>
Acked-by: George Dunlap <george.dunlap@citrix.com>
Committed-by: Keir Fraser <keir@xen.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 4 deletions

diff --git a/xen/include/xen/perfc_defn.h b/xen/include/xen/perfc_defn.h
index 2d0254cb29..3ac7b45ac3 100644
--- a/xen/include/xen/perfc_defn.h
+++ b/xen/include/xen/perfc_defn.h
@@ -39,10 +39,6 @@ PERFCOUNTER(vcpu_wake_runnable,     "csched: vcpu_wake_runnable")
 PERFCOUNTER(vcpu_wake_not_runnable, "csched: vcpu_wake_not_runnable")
 PERFCOUNTER(vcpu_park,              "csched: vcpu_park")
 PERFCOUNTER(vcpu_unpark,            "csched: vcpu_unpark")
-PERFCOUNTER(tickle_local_idler,     "csched: tickle_local_idler")
-PERFCOUNTER(tickle_local_over,      "csched: tickle_local_over")
-PERFCOUNTER(tickle_local_under,     "csched: tickle_local_under")
-PERFCOUNTER(tickle_local_other,     "csched: tickle_local_other")
 PERFCOUNTER(tickle_idlers_none,     "csched: tickle_idlers_none")
 PERFCOUNTER(tickle_idlers_some,     "csched: tickle_idlers_some")
 PERFCOUNTER(load_balance_idle,      "csched: load_balance_idle")
@@ -52,6 +48,7 @@ PERFCOUNTER(steal_trylock_failed,   "csched: steal_trylock_failed")
 PERFCOUNTER(steal_peer_idle,        "csched: steal_peer_idle")
 PERFCOUNTER(migrate_queued,         "csched: migrate_queued")
 PERFCOUNTER(migrate_running,        "csched: migrate_running")
+PERFCOUNTER(migrate_kicked_away,    "csched: migrate_kicked_away")
 PERFCOUNTER(vcpu_hot,               "csched: vcpu_hot")
 
 PERFCOUNTER(need_flush_tlb_flush,   "PG_need_flush tlb flushes")