b7eaf1aab9
The way the schedutil governor uses the PELT metric causes it to underestimate the CPU utilization in some cases. That can be easily demonstrated by running kernel compilation on a Sandy Bridge Intel processor, running turbostat in parallel with it and looking at the values written to the MSR_IA32_PERF_CTL register. Namely, the expected result would be that when all CPUs were 100% busy, all of them would be requested to run in the maximum P-state, but observation shows that this clearly isn't the case. The CPUs run in the maximum P-state for a while and then are requested to run slower and go back to the maximum P-state after a while again. That causes the actual frequency of the processor to visibly oscillate below the sustainable maximum in a jittery fashion which clearly is not desirable. That has been attributed to CPU utilization metric updates on task migration that cause the total utilization value for the CPU to be reduced by the utilization of the migrated task. If that happens, the schedutil governor may see a CPU utilization reduction and will attempt to reduce the CPU frequency accordingly right away. That may be premature, though, for example if the system is generally busy and there are other runnable tasks waiting to be run on that CPU already. This is unlikely to be an issue on systems where cpufreq policies are shared between multiple CPUs, because in those cases the policy utilization is computed as the maximum of the CPU utilization values over the whole policy and if that turns out to be low, reducing the frequency for the policy most likely is a good idea anyway. On systems with one CPU per policy, however, it may affect performance adversely and even lead to increased energy consumption in some cases. On those systems it may be addressed by taking another utilization metric into consideration, like whether or not the CPU whose frequency is about to be reduced has been idle recently, because if that's not the case, the CPU is likely to be busy in the near future and its frequency should not be reduced. To that end, use the counter of idle calls in the timekeeping code. Namely, make the schedutil governor look at that counter for the current CPU every time before its frequency is about to be reduced. If the counter has not changed since the previous iteration of the governor computations for that CPU, the CPU has been busy for all that time and its frequency should not be decreased, so if the new frequency would be lower than the one set previously, the governor will skip the frequency update. Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com> Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org> Acked-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org> Reviewed-by: Joel Fernandes <joelaf@google.com> |
||
|---|---|---|
| arch | ||
| block | ||
| certs | ||
| crypto | ||
| Documentation | ||
| drivers | ||
| firmware | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
| init | ||
| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
| lib | ||
| mm | ||
| net | ||
| samples | ||
| scripts | ||
| security | ||
| sound | ||
| tools | ||
| usr | ||
| virt | ||
| .cocciconfig | ||
| .get_maintainer.ignore | ||
| .gitattributes | ||
| .gitignore | ||
| .mailmap | ||
| COPYING | ||
| CREDITS | ||
| Kbuild | ||
| Kconfig | ||
| MAINTAINERS | ||
| Makefile | ||
| README | ||
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.