Dietmar reported that commit 3840cbe24c ("sched: psi: fix bogus
pressure spikes from aggregation race") caused a regression for him on
a high context switch rate benchmark (schbench) due to the now
repeating cpu_clock() calls.
In particular the problem is that get_recent_times() will extrapolate
the current state to 'now'. But if an update uses a timestamp from
before the start of the update, it is possible to get two reads
with inconsistent results. It is effectively back-dating an update.
(note that this all hard-relies on the clock being synchronized across
CPUs -- if this is not the case, all bets are off).
Combine this problem with the fact that there are per-group-per-cpu
seqcounts, the commit in question pushed the clock read into the group
iteration, causing tree-depth cpu_clock() calls. On architectures
where cpu_clock() has appreciable overhead, this hurts.
Instead move to a per-cpu seqcount, which allows us to have a single
clock read for all group updates, increasing internal consistency and
lowering update overhead. This comes at the cost of a longer update
side (proportional to the tree depth) which can cause the read side to
retry more often.
Fixes: 3840cbe24c ("sched: psi: fix bogus pressure spikes from aggregation race")
Reported-by: Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Acked-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Tested-by: Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@arm.com>,
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/20250522084844.GC31726@noisy.programming.kicks-ass.net
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