cpuset: remove sched domain hooks from cpusets

Remove the cpuset hooks that defined sched domains depending on the setting
of the 'cpu_exclusive' flag.

The cpu_exclusive flag can only be set on a child if it is set on the
parent.

This made that flag painfully unsuitable for use as a flag defining a
partitioning of a system.

It was entirely unobvious to a cpuset user what partitioning of sched
domains they would be causing when they set that one cpu_exclusive bit on
one cpuset, because it depended on what CPUs were in the remainder of that
cpusets siblings and child cpusets, after subtracting out other
cpu_exclusive cpusets.

Furthermore, there was no way on production systems to query the
result.

Using the cpu_exclusive flag for this was simply wrong from the get go.

Fortunately, it was sufficiently borked that so far as I know, almost no
successful use has been made of this.  One real time group did use it to
affectively isolate CPUs from any load balancing efforts.  They are willing
to adapt to alternative mechanisms for this, such as someway to manipulate
the list of isolated CPUs on a running system.  They can do without this
present cpu_exclusive based mechanism while we develop an alternative.

There is a real risk, to the best of my understanding, of users
accidentally setting up a partitioned scheduler domains, inhibiting desired
load balancing across all their CPUs, due to the nonobvious (from the
cpuset perspective) side affects of the cpu_exclusive flag.

Furthermore, since there was no way on a running system to see what one was
doing with sched domains, this change will be invisible to any using code.
Unless they have real insight to the scheduler load balancing choices, they
will be unable to detect that this change has been made in the kernel's
behaviour.

Initial discussion on lkml of this patch has generated much comment.  My
(probably controversial) take on that discussion is that it has reached a
rough concensus that the current cpuset cpu_exclusive mechanism for
defining sched domains is borked.  There is no concensus on the
replacement.  But since we can remove this mechanism, and since its
continued presence risks causing unwanted partitioning of the schedulers
load balancing, we should remove it while we can, as we proceed to work the
replacement scheduler domain mechanisms.

Signed-off-by: Paul Jackson <pj@sgi.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>
Cc: Christoph Lameter <clameter@engr.sgi.com>
Cc: Dinakar Guniguntala <dino@in.ibm.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 0 insertions, 17 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/cpusets.txt b/Documentation/cpusets.txt
index b875d231ac74..ec9de6917f01 100644
--- a/Documentation/cpusets.txt
+++ b/Documentation/cpusets.txt
@@ -87,9 +87,6 @@ This can be especially valuable on:
       and a database), or
     * NUMA systems running large HPC applications with demanding
       performance characteristics.
-    * Also cpu_exclusive cpusets are useful for servers running orthogonal
-      workloads such as RT applications requiring low latency and HPC
-      applications that are throughput sensitive
 
 These subsets, or "soft partitions" must be able to be dynamically
 adjusted, as the job mix changes, without impacting other concurrently
@@ -132,8 +129,6 @@ Cpusets extends these two mechanisms as follows:
  - A cpuset may be marked exclusive, which ensures that no other
    cpuset (except direct ancestors and descendents) may contain
    any overlapping CPUs or Memory Nodes.
-   Also a cpu_exclusive cpuset would be associated with a sched
-   domain.
  - You can list all the tasks (by pid) attached to any cpuset.
 
 The implementation of cpusets requires a few, simple hooks
@@ -145,9 +140,6 @@ into the rest of the kernel, none in performance critical paths:
    allowed in that tasks cpuset.
  - in sched.c migrate_all_tasks(), to keep migrating tasks within
    the CPUs allowed by their cpuset, if possible.
- - in sched.c, a new API partition_sched_domains for handling
-   sched domain changes associated with cpu_exclusive cpusets
-   and related changes in both sched.c and arch/ia64/kernel/domain.c
  - in the mbind and set_mempolicy system calls, to mask the requested
    Memory Nodes by what's allowed in that tasks cpuset.
  - in page_alloc.c, to restrict memory to allowed nodes.
@@ -232,15 +224,6 @@ If a cpuset is cpu or mem exclusive, no other cpuset, other than
 a direct ancestor or descendent, may share any of the same CPUs or
 Memory Nodes.
 
-A cpuset that is cpu_exclusive has a scheduler (sched) domain
-associated with it.  The sched domain consists of all CPUs in the
-current cpuset that are not part of any exclusive child cpusets.
-This ensures that the scheduler load balancing code only balances
-against the CPUs that are in the sched domain as defined above and
-not all of the CPUs in the system. This removes any overhead due to
-load balancing code trying to pull tasks outside of the cpu_exclusive
-cpuset only to be prevented by the tasks' cpus_allowed mask.
-
 A cpuset that is mem_exclusive restricts kernel allocations for
 page, buffer and other data commonly shared by the kernel across
 multiple users.  All cpusets, whether mem_exclusive or not, restrict