[PATCH v2 00/11] new cgroup controller for gpu/drm subsystem

[Tejun Heo]

Hello,

On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 04:17:14PM -0400, Kenny Ho wrote:
> Perhaps we can even narrow things down to just
> gpu.weight/gpu.compute.weight as a start?  In this aspect, is the key

That sounds great to me.

> objection to the current implementation of gpu.compute.weight the
> work-conserving bit?  This work-conserving requirement is probably
> what I have missed for the last two years (and hence going in circle.)
> 
> If this is the case, can you clarify/confirm the followings?
> 
> 1) Is resource scheduling goal of cgroup purely for the purpose of
> throughput?  (at the expense of other scheduling goals such as
> latency.)

It's not; however, work-conserving mechanisms are the easiest to use (cuz you
don't lose anything) while usually challenging to implement. It tends to
clarify how control mechanisms should be structured - even what resources are.

> 2) If 1) is true, under what circumstances will the "Allocations"
> resource distribution model (as defined in the cgroup-v2) be
> acceptable?

Allocations definitely are acceptable and it's not a pre-requisite to have
work-conserving control first either. Here, given the lack of consensus in
terms of what even constitute resource units, I don't think it'd be a good
idea to commit to the proposed interface and believe it'd be beneficial to
work on interface-wise simpler work conserving controls.

> 3) If 1) is true, are things like cpuset from cgroup v1 no longer
> acceptable going forward?

Again, they're acceptable.

> To be clear, while some have framed this (time sharing vs spatial
> sharing) as a partisan issue, it is in fact a technical one.  I have
> implemented the gpu cgroup support this way because we have a class of
> users that value low latency/low jitter/predictability/synchronicity.
> For example, they would like 4 tasks to share a GPU and they would
> like the tasks to start and finish at the same time.
> 
> What is the rationale behind picking the Weight model over Allocations
> as the first acceptable implementation?  Can't we have both
> work-conserving and non-work-conserving ways of distributing GPU
> resources?  If we can, why not allow non-work-conserving
> implementation first, especially when we have users asking for such
> functionality?

I hope the rationales are clear now. What I'm objecting is inclusion of
premature interface, which is a lot easier and more tempting to do for
hardware-specific limits and the proposals up until now have been showing
ample signs of that. I don't think my position has changed much since the
beginning - do the difficult-to-implement but easy-to-use weights first and
then you and everyone would have a better idea of what hard-limit or
allocation interfaces and mechanisms should look like, or even whether they're
needed.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun