Patch "sched/loadavg: Fix loadavg artifacts on fully idle and on fully loaded systems" has been added to the 4.4-stable tree

This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled

sched/loadavg: Fix loadavg artifacts on fully idle and on fully loaded systems

to the 4.4-stable tree which can be found at:
http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git;a=summary

The filename of the patch is:
sched-loadavg-fix-loadavg-artifacts-on-fully-idle-and-on-fully-loaded-systems.patch
and it can be found in the queue-4.4 subdirectory.

If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let <[email protected]> know about it.

From: Vik Heyndrickx <[email protected]>
Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2016 20:46:28 +0200
Subject: sched/loadavg: Fix loadavg artifacts on fully idle and on fully loaded systems

From: Vik Heyndrickx <[email protected]>

commit 20878232c52329f92423d27a60e48b6a6389e0dd upstream.

Systems show a minimal load average of 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 even when they have no load at all.

Uptime and /proc/loadavg on all systems with kernels released during the last five years up until kernel version 4.6-rc5, show a 5- and 15-minute minimum loadavg of 0.01 and 0.05 respectively. This should be 0.00 on idle systems, but the way the kernel calculates this value prevents it from getting lower than the mentioned values.

Likewise but not as obviously noticeable, a fully loaded system with no processes waiting, shows a maximum 1/5/15 loadavg of 1.00, 0.99, 0.95 (multiplied by number of cores).

Once the (old) load becomes 93 or higher, it mathematically can never get lower than 93, even when the active (load) remains 0 forever. This results in the strange 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 uptime values on idle systems. Note: 93/2048 = 0.0454..., which rounds up to 0.05.

It is not correct to add a 0.5 rounding (=1024/2048) here, since the result from this function is fed back into the next iteration again, so the result of that +0.5 rounding value then gets multiplied by (2048-2037), and then rounded again, so there is a virtual "ghost" load created, next to the old and active load terms.

By changing the way the internally kept value is rounded, that internal value equivalent now can reach 0.00 on idle, and 1.00 on full load. Upon increasing load, the internally kept load value is rounded up, when the load is decreasing, the load value is rounded down.

The modified code was tested on nohz=off and nohz kernels. It was tested on vanilla kernel 4.6-rc5 and on centos 7.1 kernel 3.10.0-327. It was tested on single, dual, and octal cores system. It was tested on virtual hosts and bare hardware. No unwanted effects have been observed, and the problems that the patch intended to fix were indeed gone.

---
 kernel/sched/loadavg.c |   11 +++++++----
 1 file changed, 7 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

@@ -99,10 +99,13 @@ long calc_load_fold_active(struct rq *th
 static unsigned long
 calc_load(unsigned long load, unsigned long exp, unsigned long active)
 {
-	load *= exp;
-	load += active * (FIXED_1 - exp);
-	load += 1UL << (FSHIFT - 1);
-	return load >> FSHIFT;
+	unsigned long newload;
+
+	newload = load * exp + active * (FIXED_1 - exp);
+	if (active >= load)
+		newload += FIXED_1-1;
+
+	return newload / FIXED_1;
 }
 
 #ifdef CONFIG_NO_HZ_COMMON

Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from [email protected] are

queue-4.4/sched-loadavg-fix-loadavg-artifacts-on-fully-idle-and-on-fully-loaded-systems.patch