psi: pressure stall information for CPU, memory, and IO

When systems are overcommitted and resources become contended, it's hard
to tell exactly the impact this has on workload productivity, or how close
the system is to lockups and OOM kills.  In particular, when machines work
multiple jobs concurrently, the impact of overcommit in terms of latency
and throughput on the individual job can be enormous.

In order to maximize hardware utilization without sacrificing individual
job health or risk complete machine lockups, this patch implements a way
to quantify resource pressure in the system.

A kernel built with CONFIG_PSI=y creates files in /proc/pressure/ that
expose the percentage of time the system is stalled on CPU, memory, or IO,
respectively.  Stall states are aggregate versions of the per-task delay
accounting delays:

       cpu: some tasks are runnable but not executing on a CPU
       memory: tasks are reclaiming, or waiting for swapin or thrashing cache
       io: tasks are waiting for io completions

These percentages of walltime can be thought of as pressure percentages,
and they give a general sense of system health and productivity loss
incurred by resource overcommit.  They can also indicate when the system
is approaching lockup scenarios and OOMs.

To do this, psi keeps track of the task states associated with each CPU
and samples the time they spend in stall states.  Every 2 seconds, the
samples are averaged across CPUs - weighted by the CPUs' non-idle time to
eliminate artifacts from unused CPUs - and translated into percentages of
walltime.  A running average of those percentages is maintained over 10s,
1m, and 5m periods (similar to the loadaverage).

[hannes@cmpxchg.org: doc fixlet, per Randy]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180828205625.GA14030@cmpxchg.org
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: code optimization]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180907175015.GA8479@cmpxchg.org
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: rename psi_clock() to psi_update_work(), per Peter]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180907145404.GB11088@cmpxchg.org
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: fix build]
  Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180913014222.GA2370@cmpxchg.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180828172258.3185-9-hannes@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Tested-by: Daniel Drake <drake@endlessm.com>
Tested-by: Suren Baghdasaryan <surenb@google.com>
Cc: Christopher Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@fb.com>
Cc: Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>
Cc: Peter Enderborg <peter.enderborg@sony.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Vinayak Menon <vinmenon@codeaurora.org>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 64 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/accounting/psi.txt b/Documentation/accounting/psi.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..3753a82f1cf5
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/accounting/psi.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,64 @@
+================================
+PSI - Pressure Stall Information
+================================
+
+:Date: April, 2018
+:Author: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
+
+When CPU, memory or IO devices are contended, workloads experience
+latency spikes, throughput losses, and run the risk of OOM kills.
+
+Without an accurate measure of such contention, users are forced to
+either play it safe and under-utilize their hardware resources, or
+roll the dice and frequently suffer the disruptions resulting from
+excessive overcommit.
+
+The psi feature identifies and quantifies the disruptions caused by
+such resource crunches and the time impact it has on complex workloads
+or even entire systems.
+
+Having an accurate measure of productivity losses caused by resource
+scarcity aids users in sizing workloads to hardware--or provisioning
+hardware according to workload demand.
+
+As psi aggregates this information in realtime, systems can be managed
+dynamically using techniques such as load shedding, migrating jobs to
+other systems or data centers, or strategically pausing or killing low
+priority or restartable batch jobs.
+
+This allows maximizing hardware utilization without sacrificing
+workload health or risking major disruptions such as OOM kills.
+
+Pressure interface
+==================
+
+Pressure information for each resource is exported through the
+respective file in /proc/pressure/ -- cpu, memory, and io.
+
+The format for CPU is as such:
+
+some avg10=0.00 avg60=0.00 avg300=0.00 total=0
+
+and for memory and IO:
+
+some avg10=0.00 avg60=0.00 avg300=0.00 total=0
+full avg10=0.00 avg60=0.00 avg300=0.00 total=0
+
+The "some" line indicates the share of time in which at least some
+tasks are stalled on a given resource.
+
+The "full" line indicates the share of time in which all non-idle
+tasks are stalled on a given resource simultaneously. In this state
+actual CPU cycles are going to waste, and a workload that spends
+extended time in this state is considered to be thrashing. This has
+severe impact on performance, and it's useful to distinguish this
+situation from a state where some tasks are stalled but the CPU is
+still doing productive work. As such, time spent in this subset of the
+stall state is tracked separately and exported in the "full" averages.
+
+The ratios are tracked as recent trends over ten, sixty, and three
+hundred second windows, which gives insight into short term events as
+well as medium and long term trends. The total absolute stall time is
+tracked and exported as well, to allow detection of latency spikes
+which wouldn't necessarily make a dent in the time averages, or to
+average trends over custom time frames.