sched/numa: Favour moving tasks towards the preferred node

This patch favours moving tasks towards NUMA node that recorded a higher
number of NUMA faults during active load balancing.  Ideally this is
self-reinforcing as the longer the task runs on that node, the more faults
it should incur causing task_numa_placement to keep the task running on that
node. In reality a big weakness is that the nodes CPUs can be overloaded
and it would be more efficient to queue tasks on an idle node and migrate
to the new node. This would require additional smarts in the balancer so
for now the balancer will simply prefer to place the task on the preferred
node for a PTE scans which is controlled by the numa_balancing_settle_count
sysctl. Once the settle_count number of scans has complete the schedule
is free to place the task on an alternative node if the load is imbalanced.

[srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com: Fixed statistics]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Reviewed-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Andrea Arcangeli <aarcange@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Cc: Srikar Dronamraju <srikar@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
[ Tunable and use higher faults instead of preferred. ]
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1381141781-10992-23-git-send-email-mgorman@suse.de
Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
index 8cd7e5fc79da..d48bca45b6f2 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/kernel.txt
@@ -375,7 +375,8 @@ feature should be disabled. Otherwise, if the system overhead from the
 feature is too high then the rate the kernel samples for NUMA hinting
 faults may be controlled by the numa_balancing_scan_period_min_ms,
 numa_balancing_scan_delay_ms, numa_balancing_scan_period_reset,
-numa_balancing_scan_period_max_ms and numa_balancing_scan_size_mb sysctls.
+numa_balancing_scan_period_max_ms, numa_balancing_scan_size_mb and
+numa_balancing_settle_count sysctls.
 
 ==============================================================
 
@@ -420,6 +421,11 @@ scanned for a given scan.
 numa_balancing_scan_period_reset is a blunt instrument that controls how
 often a tasks scan delay is reset to detect sudden changes in task behaviour.
 
+numa_balancing_settle_count is how many scan periods must complete before
+the schedule balancer stops pushing the task towards a preferred node. This
+gives the scheduler a chance to place the task on an alternative node if the
+preferred node is overloaded.
+
 ==============================================================
 
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