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[20161109] Looking at the scheduler issue again (Updated)
I've encountered a funny scheduler behaviour the other day in a Xen enviroment. The behaviour was that CPU load was not distributed evenly on all CPUs, i.e. in my case on a 2-CPU-system, two CPU-bound processes fought over the same CPU, leaving the other one idle.

I had another look at this today, and was able to reproduce the behaviour using VMWare Fusion with two CPU cores on both NetBSD 7.0_STABLE as well as -current, both with sources as of today, 2016-11-08. I've also made a screenshot available that shows the issue on both systems. I have also filed a problem report to document the issue.

The one hint that I got so far was from Michael van Elst that there may be a rounding error in sched_balance(). Looking at the code, there is not much room for a rounding error. But I am not familiar enough (at all) with the code, so I cannot judge if crucial bits are dropped here, or how that function fits in the whole puzzled.

Update: Pondering on the "rounding error", I've setup both VMs with 4 CPUs, and the behaviour shown there is that load is distributed to about 3 and a half CPU - three CPUs under full load, and one not reaching 100%. There's definitely something fishy in there. See screenshot.

Splitting up the four CPUs on different processor sets with one process assigned to each set (using psrset(8)) leads to an even load distribution here, too. This leads me to thinking that the NetBSD scheduling works well between different processor sets, but is busted within one set.

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Disclaimer: All opinion expressed here is purely my own. No responsibility is taken for anything.

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