On 6/14/2013 9:05 AM, 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.
... except that such a solution does not really work for Intel hardware.
The OS does not get to really pick the CPU "frequency" (never mind that frequency is not what gets controlled), the hardware picks the frequency. The OS can do some level of requests (best to think of this as a percentage more than frequency) but what you actually get is more often than not what you asked for.
You can look in hindsight what kind of performance you got (from some basic counters in MSRs), and the scheduler can use that to account backwards to what some process got. But to predict what you will get in the future...... that's near impossible on any realistic system nowadays (and even more so in the future).
Treating "frequency" (well "performance) and idle separately is also a false thing to do (yes I know in 3.9/3.10 we still do that for Intel hw, but we're working on fixing that). They are by no means separate things. One guy's idle state is the other guys power budget (and thus performance)!.