From: Libo Chen <libo.chen@xxxxxxxxxx> Task swapping is triggered when there are no idle CPUs in task A's preferred node. In this case, the NUMA load balancer chooses a task B on A's preferred node and swaps B with A. This helps improve NUMA locality without introducing load imbalance between nodes. In the current implementation, B's NUMA node preference is not mandatory. That is to say, a kernel thread might be incorrectly chosen as B. However, kernel thread and user space thread that does not have mm are not supposed to be covered by NUMA balancing because NUMA balancing only considers user pages via VMAs. According to Peter's suggestion for fixing this issue, we use PF_KTHREAD to skip the kernel thread. curr->mm is also checked because it is possible that user_mode_thread() might create a user thread without an mm. As per Prateek's analysis, after adding the PF_KTHREAD check, there is no need to further check the PF_IDLE flag: " - play_idle_precise() already ensures PF_KTHREAD is set before adding PF_IDLE - cpu_startup_entry() is only called from the startup thread which should be marked with PF_KTHREAD (based on my understanding looking at commit cff9b2332ab7 ("kernel/sched: Modify initial boot task idle setup")) " In summary, the check in task_numa_compare() now aligns with task_tick_numa(). Suggested-by: Michal Koutny <mkoutny@xxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Ayush Jain <Ayush.jain3@xxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Libo Chen <libo.chen@xxxxxxxxxx> Tested-by: Venkat Rao Bagalkote <venkat88@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Chen Yu <yu.c.chen@xxxxxxxxx> --- v4->v5: Add PF_KTHREAD check, and remove PF_IDLE check. --- kernel/sched/fair.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/kernel/sched/fair.c b/kernel/sched/fair.c index 0fb9bf995a47..03d9a49a68b9 100644 --- a/kernel/sched/fair.c +++ b/kernel/sched/fair.c @@ -2273,7 +2273,8 @@ static bool task_numa_compare(struct task_numa_env *env, rcu_read_lock(); cur = rcu_dereference(dst_rq->curr); - if (cur && ((cur->flags & PF_EXITING) || is_idle_task(cur))) + if (cur && ((cur->flags & (PF_EXITING | PF_KTHREAD)) || + !cur->mm)) cur = NULL; /* -- 2.25.1