Re: [PATCH v5 11/12] sched: replace capacity_factor by utilization

From: Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>
To: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Nicolas Pitre <nicolas.pitre@linaro.org>,
	Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Preeti U Murthy <preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>,
	LAK <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>,
	Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>, Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>,
	"linaro-kernel@lists.linaro.org" <linaro-kernel@lists.linaro.org>,
	Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@linaro.org>,
	Dietmar Eggemann <Dietmar.Eggemann@arm.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH v5 11/12] sched: replace capacity_factor by utilization
Date: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 19:58:31 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140917185831.GC9854@e103034-lin> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20140917184527.GB9854@e103034-lin>

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 07:45:27PM +0100, Morten Rasmussen wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 09:01:59PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 03:07:44PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > On Mon, 15 Sep 2014, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > 
> > > Let's suppose a task running on a 1GHz CPU producing a load of 100.
> > > 
> > > The same task on a 100MHz CPU would produce a load of 1000 because that 
> > > CPU is 10x slower.  So to properly evaluate the load of a task when 
> > > moving it around, we want to normalize its load based on the CPU 
> > > performance.  In this case the correction factor would be 0.1.
> > > 
> > > Given those normalized loads, we need to scale CPU capacity as well.  If 
> > > the 1GHz CPU can handle 50 of those tasks it has a capacity of 5000.
> > > 
> > > In theory the 100MHz CPU could handle only 5 of those tasks, meaning it 
> > > has a normalized capacity of 500, but only if the load metric is already 
> > > normalized as well.
> > > 
> > > Or am I completely missing the point here?
> > 
> > So I was thinking of the usage as per the next patch; where we decide if
> > a cpu is 'full' or not based on the utilization measure. For this
> > measure we're not interested in inter CPU relations at all, and any use
> > of capacity scaling simply doesn't make sense.
> 
> Right. You don't need to scale capacity to determine whether a cpu is
> full or not if you don't have DVFS, but I don't think it hurts if it is
> done right. We need the scaling to figure out how much capacity is
> available.
> 
> > But I think you asking this question shows a 'bigger' problem in that
> > the Changelogs are entirely failing at describing the actual problem and
> > proposed solution. Because if that were clear, I don't think we would be
> > having this particular discussion.
> 
> Yes, the bigger problem of scaling things with DVFS and taking
> big.LITTLE into account is not addressed in this patch set. This is the
> scale-invariance problem that we discussed at Ksummit.

big.LITTLE is factored in this patch set, but DVFS is not. My bad.

Morten