I don't think the code is quite ready, which is why I asked for Peter's
additions to also be merged before I acked it (although it turned out that
it still isn't quite ready with his additions either).
Basically I have had similar observations to Suresh in that it does not
play nicely with the rest of the balancing infrastructure (and raised
similar concerns in my review).
The samples (group of 4) I got for "maximum recorded imbalance" on a 2x2
SMP+HT Xeon are as follows:
| Following boot | hackbench 20 | hackbench 40
-----------+----------------+---------------------+---------------------
2.6.16-rc2 | 30,37,100,112 | 5600,5530,6020,6090 | 6390,7090,8760,8470
+nosmpnice | 3, 2, 4, 2 | 28, 150, 294, 132 | 348, 348, 294, 347
Hackbench raw performance is down around 15% with smpnice (but that in
itself isn't a huge deal because it is just a benchmark). However, the
samples show that the imbalance passed into move_tasks is increased by
about a factor of 10-30. I think this would also go some way to explaining
latency blips turning up in the balancing code (though I haven't actually
measured that).
We'll probably have to revert this in the SUSE kernel.
Cc: "Siddha, Suresh B" <suresh.b.siddha@intel.com>
Acked-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Peter Williams <pwil3058@bigpond.net.au>
Cc: "Martin J. Bligh" <mbligh@aracnet.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
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