]> git.ipfire.org Git - thirdparty/kernel/linux.git/commit
sched/fair: Prefer fully-idle SMT cores in asym-capacity idle selection
authorAndrea Righi <arighi@nvidia.com>
Mon, 11 May 2026 14:25:02 +0000 (16:25 +0200)
committerPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Tue, 19 May 2026 10:17:38 +0000 (12:17 +0200)
commit25a32e400a14009601c0a727643057f5515152df
treea04344d869a21f7856904fcc2069f7cb81b64141
parentfdfe5a8cd8731dd81840f26abfb6527edd27b0cb
sched/fair: Prefer fully-idle SMT cores in asym-capacity idle selection

On systems with asymmetric CPU capacity (e.g., ACPI/CPPC reporting
different per-core frequencies), the wakeup path uses
select_idle_capacity() and prioritizes idle CPUs with higher capacity
for better task placement. However, when those CPUs belong to SMT cores,
their effective capacity can be much lower than the nominal capacity
when the sibling thread is busy: SMT siblings compete for shared
resources, so a "high capacity" CPU that is idle but whose sibling is
busy does not deliver its full capacity. This effective capacity
reduction cannot be modeled by the static capacity value alone.

Introduce SMT awareness in the asym-capacity idle selection policy: when
SMT is active, always prefer fully-idle SMT cores over partially-idle
ones.

Prioritizing fully-idle SMT cores yields better task placement because
the effective capacity of partially-idle SMT cores is reduced; always
preferring them when available leads to more accurate capacity usage on
task wakeup.

On an SMT system with asymmetric CPU capacities (NVIDIA Vera Rubin),
SMT-aware idle selection has been shown to improve throughput by around
15-18% over NO_ASYM mainline and by around 60% over ASYM mainline, for
CPU-bound workloads (NVBLAS) running an amount of tasks equal to the
amount of SMT cores.

Reported-by: Felix Abecassis <fabecassis@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrea Righi <arighi@nvidia.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: K Prateek Nayak <kprateek.nayak@amd.com>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260511142502.3873984-1-arighi@nvidia.com
kernel/sched/fair.c