Thermal governors can respond to an overheat event for a cpu by capping the cpu's maximum possible frequency. This in turn means that the maximum available compute capacity of the cpu is restricted. But today in linux kernel, in event of maximum frequency capping of a cpu, the maximum available compute capacity of the cpu is not adjusted at all. In other words, scheduler is unware maximum cpu capacity restrictions placed due to thermal activity. This patch series attempts to address this issue. The benefits identified are better task placement among available cpus in event of overheating which in turn leads to better performance numbers.
The delta between the maximum possible capacity of a cpu and maximum available capacity of a cpu due to thermal event can be considered as thermal pressure. Instantaneous thermal pressure is hard to record and can sometime be erroneous as there can be mismatch between the actual capping of capacity and scheduler recording it. Thus solution is to have a weighted average per cpu value for thermal pressure over time. The weight reflects the amount of time the cpu has spent at a capped maximum frequency. To accumulate, average and appropriately decay thermal pressure, this patch series uses pelt signals and reuses the available framework that does a similar bookkeeping of rt/dl task utilization. Regarding testing, basic build, boot and sanity testing have been performed on hikey960 mainline kernel with debian file system. Further aobench (An occlusion renderer for benchmarking realworld floating point performance) showed the following results on hikey960 with debain. Result Standard Standard (Time secs) Error Deviation Hikey 960 - no thermal pressure applied 138.67 6.52 11.52% Hikey 960 - thermal pressure applied 122.37 5.78 11.57% Thara Gopinath (7): sched/pelt: Add option to make load and util calculations frequency invariant sched/pelt.c: Add support to track thermal pressure sched: Add infrastructure to store and update instantaneous thermal pressure sched: Initialize per cpu thermal pressure structure sched/fair: Enable CFS periodic tick to update thermal pressure sched/fair: update cpu_capcity to reflect thermal pressure thermal/cpu-cooling: Update thermal pressure in case of a maximum frequency capping drivers/base/arch_topology.c | 1 + drivers/thermal/cpu_cooling.c | 20 ++++++++++++- include/linux/sched.h | 14 +++++++++ kernel/sched/Makefile | 2 +- kernel/sched/core.c | 2 ++ kernel/sched/fair.c | 4 +++ kernel/sched/pelt.c | 40 ++++++++++++++++++-------- kernel/sched/pelt.h | 7 +++++ kernel/sched/sched.h | 1 + kernel/sched/thermal.c | 66 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ kernel/sched/thermal.h | 13 +++++++++ 11 files changed, 157 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) create mode 100644 kernel/sched/thermal.c create mode 100644 kernel/sched/thermal.h -- 2.1.4