So far we didn't enable the cpu controller because of overhead of the
accounting. If I'm reading things correctly, delegation was enabled for a while
for the units with user and pam context set, i.e. for user@.service too.
a931ad47a8 added the explicit Delegate=yes|no
switch, but it was initially set to 'yes'.
acc8059129 disabled delegation for user@.service
with the justication that CPU accounting is expensive, but half a year later
a88c5b8ac4 changed DefaultCPUAccounting=yes for
kernels >=4.15 with the justification that CPU accounting is inexpensive there.
In my (very noncomprehensive) testing, I don't see a measurable overhead if the
cpu controller is enabled for user slices. I tried some repeated compilations,
and there is was no statistical difference, but the noise level was fairly
high. Maybe better benchmarking would reveal a difference.
The goal of this change is very simple: currently all of the user session,
including services like the display server and pipewire are under user@.service.
This means that when e.g. a compilation job is started in the session's
app.slice, the processes in session.slice compete for CPU and can be starved.
In particular, audio starts to stutter, etc. With CPU controller enabled,
I can start start 'ninja -C build -j40' in a tab and this doesn't have any
noticable effect on audio.
I don't think the particular values matter too much: the CPU controller is
work-convserving, and presumably the session slice would never need more than
e.g. one 1 full CPU, i.e. half or a quarter of available CPU resources on even
the smallest of today's machines. app.slice and session.slice are assigned
equal weights, background.slice is assigned a smaller fraction. CPUWeight=100
is the default, but I wrote it explicitly to make it easier for users to see
how the split is done. So effectively this should result in session.slice
getting as much power as it needs.
If if turns out that this does have a noticable overhead, we could make it
opt-in. But I think that the benefit to usability is important enough to enable
it by default. W/o something like this the session is not really usable with
background tasks.
