From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Antti P Miettinen Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/2] RFC: CPU frequency max as PM QoS param Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:00:41 +0200 Message-ID: <87pqd94yeu.fsf@amiettinen-lnx.nvidia.com> References: <1326976559-4009-1-git-send-email-amiettinen@nvidia.com> <87d39fk2n3.fsf@ti.com> <20120217030453.GA3266@gs62> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: linux-pm-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org Errors-To: linux-pm-bounces@lists.linux-foundation.org Cc: linux-pm@lists.linux-foundation.org, cpufreq@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-pm@vger.kernel.org Thanks for the comments. I'd like to comment on maximum CPU frequency, sysfs files and per device contraints.. Maximum CPU frequency could be useful for thermal. However, it is not a complete solution for thermal. Just like minimum CPU frequency is not a complete solution for computing throughput (e.g. memory and accelerator control are not directly addressed by a CPU frequency constraint). Maximum CPU frequency can be also useful for energy efficiency even though the constraint is not a complete solution here either. I guess latency constraints do not completely solve end-to-end latency requirements but the mechanism is useful so it is good to have it. I'd argue minimum and maximum frequency are simular in this respect. There are sysfs files for constraining CPU frequency. However, there is no arbitration for several applications trying to place constraints. PM QoS provides a way to consolidate requests from several applications and cleanup upon application crash. I think the existing sysfs files are not an appropriate inferface for user space applications. Currently CPU sleep states are blocked globally for latency contraints. Finer granularity control would be possible with per CPU contraints. However - are there clients that know or want to contrain a specific CPU? Same question is applicable also to CPU frequency. Even though per CPU control is more flexible, what are the clients that want to constrain a specific CPU? Another complication for the per device constraints is the user space interface. Dynamic minors run out pretty fast if we have per CPU parameters and the system has huge number of CPUs. Does anyone have any opinions about the user space interface for device PM QoS? --Antti