On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Morten Rasmussen wrote:
Looking at the discussion it seems that people have slightly different views, but most agree that the goal is an integrated scheduling, frequency, and idle policy like you pointed out from the beginning.
What is less clear is how such design would look like. Catalin has suggested two different approaches. Integrating cpufreq into the load balancing, or let the scheduler focus on load balancing and extend cpufreq to also restrict number of cpus available to the scheduler using cpu_power. The former approach would increase the scheduler complexity significantly as I already highlighted in my first reply. The latter approach introduces a way to, at lease initially, separate load balancing from capacity management, which I think is an interesting approach. Based on this idea I propose the following design:
+-----------------+ | | +----------+ current load | Power scheduler |<----+ cpufreq | +--------->| sched/power.c +---->| driver | | | | +----------+ | +-------+---------+ | ^ | +-----+---------+ | | | | | | available capacity | Scheduler |<--+----+ (e.g. cpu_power) | sched/fair.c | | | +--+| +---------------+ || ^ || | v|+---------+--------+ +----------+ | task load metric | | cpuidle | | arch/* | | driver | +------------------+ +----------+
The intention is that the power scheduler will implement the (unified) power policy. It gets the current load of the system from the scheduler. Based on this information it will adjust the compute capacity available to the scheduler and drive frequency changes such that enough compute capacity is available to handle the current load. If the total load can be handled by a subset of cpus, it will reduce the capacity of the excess cpus to 0 (cpu_power=1). Likewise, if the load increases it will increase capacity of one or more idle cpus to allow the scheduler to spread the load. The power scheduler has knowledge about the power topology and will guide the scheduler to idle the most optimum cpus by reducing its capacity. Global idle decision will be handled by the power scheduler, so cpuidle can over time be reduced to become just a driver, once we have added C-state selection to the power scheduler.
The scheduler is left to focus on scheduling mechanics and finding the best possible load balance on the cpu capacities set by the power scheduler. It will share a detailed view of the current load with the power scheduler to enable it to make the right capacity adjustments. The scheduler will need some optimization to cope better with asymmetric compute capacities. We may want to reduce capacity of some cpu to increase their idle time while letting others take the majority of the load.
Frequency scaling has a problematic impact on PJT's load metic, which was pointed out a while ago by Chris Redpath https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/4/16/289. So I agree with Arjan's suggestion to change the load calculation basis to something which is frequency invariant. Use whatever counters that are available on the specific platform.
I'm aware that the scheduler and power scheduler decisions may be inextricably linked so we may decide to merge them. However, I think it is worth trying to keep the power scheduling decisions out of the scheduler until we have proven it infeasible.
We are going to start working on this design and see where it takes us. We will post any results and suggested patches for folk to comment on. As a starting point we are planning to create a power scheduler (kernel/sched/power.c) similar to a cpufreq governor that does capacity management, and then evolve the solution from there.
I don't think that you are passing nearly enough information around.
A fairly simple example
take a relatively modern 4-core system with turbo mode where speed controls affect two cores at a time (I don't know the details of the available CPUs to know if this is an exact fit to any existing system, but I think it's a reasonable fit)
If you are running with a loadave of 2, should you power down 2 cores and run the other two in turbo mode, power down 2 cores and not increase the speed, or leave all 4 cores running as is.
Depending on the mix of processes, I could see any one of the three being the right answer.
If you have a process that's maxing out it's cpu time on one core, going to turbo mode is the right thing as the other processes should fit on the other core and that process will use more CPU (theoretically getting done sooner)
If no process is close to maxing out the core, then if you are in power saving mode, you probably want to shut down two cores and run everything on the other two
If you only have two processes eating almost all your CPU time, going to two cores is probably the right thing to do.
If you have more processes, each eating a little bit of time, then continuing to run on all four cores uses more cache, and could let all of the tasks finish faster.
So, how is the Power Scheduler going to get this level of information?
It doesn't seem reasonable to either pass this much data around, or to try and give two independant tools access to the same raw data (since that data is so tied to the internal details of the scheduler). If we are talking two parts of the same thing, then it's perfectly legitimate to have this sort of intimate knowledge of the internal data structures.
Also, if the power scheduler puts the cores at different speeds, how is the balancing scheduler supposed to know so that it can schedule appropriately? This is the bigLittle problem again.
It's this level of knowledge that both the power management and the scheduler need to know about what's going on in the guts of the other that make me say that they really are going to need to be merged.
The routines to change the core modes will be external, and will vary wildly between different systems, but the decision making logic should be unified.
David Lang