sched_ext: Add lockless peek operation for DSQs

The builtin DSQ queue data structures are meant to be used by a wide
range of different sched_ext schedulers with different demands on these
data structures. They might be per-cpu with low-contention, or
high-contention shared queues. Unfortunately, DSQs have a coarse-grained
lock around the whole data structure. Without going all the way to a
lock-free, more scalable implementation, a small step we can take to
reduce lock contention is to allow a lockless, small-fixed-cost peek at
the head of the queue.

This change allows certain custom SCX schedulers to cheaply peek at
queues, e.g. during load balancing, before locking them. But it
represents a few extra memory operations to update the pointer each
time the DSQ is modified, including a memory barrier on ARM so the write
appears correctly ordered.

This commit adds a first_task pointer field which is updated
atomically when the DSQ is modified, and allows any thread to peek at
the head of the queue without holding the lock.

Signed-off-by: Ryan Newton <newton@meta.com>
Reviewed-by: Andrea Righi <arighi@nvidia.com>
Reviewed-by: Christian Loehle <christian.loehle@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/sched/ext.h b/include/linux/sched/ext.h
index 9848aeab2786..4713f374acc0 100644
--- a/include/linux/sched/ext.h
+++ b/include/linux/sched/ext.h
@@ -58,6 +58,7 @@ enum scx_dsq_id_flags {
  */
 struct scx_dispatch_q {
 	raw_spinlock_t		lock;
+	struct task_struct __rcu *first_task; /* lockless peek at head */
 	struct list_head	list;	/* tasks in dispatch order */
 	struct rb_root		priq;	/* used to order by p->scx.dsq_vtime */
 	u32			nr;