• Rafael J. Wysocki's avatar
    cpuidle: New timer events oriented governor for tickless systems · b26bf6ab
    Rafael J. Wysocki authored
    The venerable menu governor does some things that are quite
    questionable in my view.
    
    First, it includes timer wakeups in the pattern detection data and
    mixes them up with wakeups from other sources which in some cases
    causes it to expect what essentially would be a timer wakeup in a
    time frame in which no timer wakeups are possible (because it knows
    the time until the next timer event and that is later than the
    expected wakeup time).
    
    Second, it uses the extra exit latency limit based on the predicted
    idle duration and depending on the number of tasks waiting on I/O,
    even though those tasks may run on a different CPU when they are
    woken up.  Moreover, the time ranges used by it for the sleep length
    correction factors depend on whether or not there are tasks waiting
    on I/O, which again doesn't imply anything in particular, and they
    are not correlated to the list of available idle states in any way
    whatever.
    
    Also, the pattern detection code in menu may end up considering
    values that are too large to matter at all, in which cases running
    it is a waste of time.
    
    A major rework of the menu governor would be required to address
    these issues and the performance of at least some workloads (tuned
    specifically to the current behavior of the menu governor) is likely
    to suffer from that.  It is thus better to introduce an entirely new
    governor without them and let everybody use the governor that works
    better with their actual workloads.
    
    The new governor introduced here, the timer events oriented (TEO)
    governor, uses the same basic strategy as menu: it always tries to
    find the deepest idle state that can be used in the given conditions.
    However, it applies a different approach to that problem.
    
    First, it doesn't use "correction factors" for the time till the
    closest timer, but instead it tries to correlate the measured idle
    duration values with the available idle states and use that
    information to pick up the idle state that is most likely to "match"
    the upcoming CPU idle interval.
    
    Second, it doesn't take the number of "I/O waiters" into account at
    all and the pattern detection code in it avoids taking timer wakeups
    into account.  It also only uses idle duration values less than the
    current time till the closest timer (with the tick excluded) for that
    purpose.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarDaniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@linaro.org>
    b26bf6ab
Makefile 167 Bytes