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The idle_balance() kernel function is responsible for balancing SCHED_OTHER tasks when a core goes idle. This function is called with interrupts disabled, meaning on systems with a large number of cores (>=64) hundreds of microseconds can be spent in the balance function without the opportunity for a high priority task to preempt and run.
This behavior can be seen when running rteval on a 72-core HP DL580gen9 and observing the lock contention on the run-queue locks when idle_balance() is called. The cyclictest thread on the core that is running idle_balance() cannot run; it's timer fires but the interrupt is held off due to idle_balance() running and the cyclictest thread misses its deadline by hundreds of microseconds.
There are a few separate issues here:
1) idle_balance is currently called with irqs disabled, Steven Rostedt has a patch to fix that
2) idle_balance continues to iterate over all CPUs even if a runnable task shows up during balancing, I have a patch to fix that
We need both of these fixes together to get the system to behave better.
Since the problem described in this bug report should be
resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a
resolution of ERRATA.
For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated
files, follow the link below.
If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report.
https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2016-2584.html