On 02/08/2012 11:51 PM, Ingo Molnar wrote:
- Benjamin Herrenschmidtbenh@kernel.crashing.org wrote:
On Wed, 2012-02-08 at 15:23 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
I think the biggest mistake we ever made with cpufreq was making it so configurable. If we redesign it, just say no to plugin governors, and yes to a lot fewer sysfs knobs.
So, provide mechanism to kill off all the governors, and there's a migration path from what we have now to something that just works in a lot more cases, while remaining configurable enough for the corner-cases.
On the other hand, the need for schedulable contxts may not necessarily go away.
We will support it, but the *sane* hw solution is where frequency transitions can be done atomically.
I'm not sure atomicity has much to do with this. From what I can tell, it's about the physical characteristics of the voltage source and the load on said source.
After a quick digging around for some info for one of our platforms (ARM/MSM), it looks like it will take 200us to ramp up the power rail from the voltage for the lowest CPU freq to voltage for the highest CPU freq. And that's ignoring any communication delay. The 200us is purely how long it takes for the PMIC output to settle given the power load from the CPU. I would think other PMICs from different manufacturers would be in the same ballpark.
200us is a lot of time to add to a context switch or to busy wait on when the processors today can run at GHz speeds.
So, with what I know this doesn't look like a matter of broken HW unless the PMIC I'm looking up data for is a really crappy one. I'm sure other in the community know more about PMICs than I do and they can correct me if the general PMIC voltage settling characteristic is much better than the one I'm look at.
Most workloads change their characteristics very quickly, and so does their power management profile change.
The user-space driven policy model failed for that reason: it was *way* too slow in reacting) - and slow hardware transitions suck for a similar reason as well.
I think we all agree on this.
We accomodate all hardware as well as we can, but we *design* for proper hardware. So Peter is right, this should be done properly.
When you say accommodate all hardware, does it mean we will keep around CPUfreq and allow attempts at improving it? Or we will completely move to scheduler based CPU freq scaling, but won't try to force atomicity? Say, may be queue up a notification to a CPU driver to scale up the frequency as soon as it can?
IMHO, I think the problem with CPUfreq and its dynamic governors today is that they do a timer based sampling of the CPU load instead of getting some hints from the scheduler when the scheduler knows that the load average is quite high.
-Saravana