On Tuesday, April 01, 2014 11:14:33 PM Nicolas Pitre wrote: > On Wed, 2 Apr 2014, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote: > > > On Friday, March 28, 2014 01:29:53 PM Daniel Lezcano wrote: > > > The following patchset provides an interaction between cpuidle and the > > > scheduler. > > > > > > The first patch encapsulate the needed information for the scheduler in a > > > separate cpuidle structure. The second one stores the pointer to this > > > structure > > > when entering idle. The third one, use this information to take the > > > decision to > > > find the idlest cpu. > > > > > > After some basic testing with hackbench, it appears there is an > > > improvement for > > > the performances (small) and for the duration of the idle states (which > > > provides > > > a better power saving). > > > > > > The measurement has been done with the 'idlestat' tool previously posted > > > in this > > > mailing list. > > > > > > So the benefit is good for both sides performance and power saving. > > > > > > The select_idle_sibling could be also improved in the same way. > > > > Well, quite frankly, I don't really like this series. Not the idea itself, > > but > > the way it has been implemented. > > > > First off, if the scheduler is to access idle state data stored in struct > > cpuidle_state, I'm not sure why we need a separate new structure for that? > > Couldn't there be a pointer to a whole struct cpuidle_state from struct rq > > instead? [->exit_latency is the only field that find_idlest_cpu() in your > > third patch seems to be using anyway.] > > Future patches are likely to use the other fields. I presume that's why > Daniel put them there. > > But I admit being on the fence about this i.e whether or not we should > encapsulate shared fields into a separate structure or not.
Quite frankly, I don't see a point in using a separate structure here. > > Second, is accessing the idle state information for all CPUs from > > find_idlest_cpu() > > guaranteed to be non-racy? I mean, what if a CPU changes its state from > > idle to > > non-idle while another one is executing find_idlest_cpu()? In other words, > > where's the read memory barrier corresponding to the write ones in the > > modified > > cpu_idle_call()? And is the memory barrier actually sufficient? After all, > > you need to guarantee that the CPU is still idle after you have evaluated > > idle_cpu() on it. > > I don't think avoiding races is all that important here. Right now any > idle CPU is selected regardless of its idle state depth. What this > patch should do (considering my previous comments on it) is to favor the > idle CPU with the shalloest idle state. If once in a while the > selection is wrong because of a race we're not going to make it any > worse than what we have today without this patch. > > That probably means the write barrier could potentially be omitted as > well if it implies a useless cost. Yes, the write barriers don't seem to serve any real purpose. > We need to ensure the cpuidle data structure is not going away (e.g. > cpuidle driver module removal) while another CPU looks at it though. > The timing would have to be awfully weird for this to happen but still. Well, I'm not sure if that is a real concern. Only a couple of drivers try to implement module unloading and I guess this isn't tested too much, so perhaps we should just make it impossible to unload a cpuidle driver? > > Finally, is really the heuristics used by find_idlest_cpu() to select the > > "idlest" > > CPU the best one? What about deeper vs shallower idle states, for example? > > That's what this patch series is about. The find_idlest_cpu code should > look for the idle CPU with the shallowest idle state, or the one with > the smallest load. In this context "find_idlest_cpu" might become a > misnomer. Yes, clearly. It should be called find_best_cpu or something like that. Thanks! -- I speak only for myself. Rafael J. Wysocki, Intel Open Source Technology Center. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
