Re: [PATCH V2 6/7] thermal/drivers/cpu_cooling: Introduce the cpu idle cooling driver

[Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@linaro.org>]

On 27/03/2018 04:03, Leo Yan wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
> 
> On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 04:29:27PM +0100, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
>> The cpu idle cooling driver performs synchronized idle injection across all
>> cpus belonging to the same cluster and offers a new method to cool down a SoC.
>>
>> Each cluster has its own idle cooling device, each core has its own idle
>> injection thread, each idle injection thread uses play_idle to enter idle.  In
>> order to reach the deepest idle state, each cooling device has the idle
>> injection threads synchronized together.
>>
>> It has some similarity with the intel power clamp driver but it is actually
>> designed to work on the ARM architecture via the DT with a mathematical proof
>> with the power model which comes with the Documentation.
>>
>> The idle injection cycle is fixed while the running cycle is variable. That
>> allows to have control on the device reactivity for the user experience. At
>> the mitigation point the idle threads are unparked, they play idle the
>> specified amount of time and they schedule themselves. The last thread sets
>> the next idle injection deadline and when the timer expires it wakes up all
>> the threads which in turn play idle again. Meanwhile the running cycle is
>> changed by set_cur_state.  When the mitigation ends, the threads are parked.
>> The algorithm is self adaptive, so there is no need to handle hotplugging.
> 
> The idle injection threads are RT threads (FIFO) and I saw in
> play_idle() set/clear flag PF_IDLE for it.  Will these idle injection
> threads utilization be accounted into RT utilization?
> 
> If idle injection threads utilization is accounted as RT tasks
> utilization, will this impact CPUFreq governor 'schedutil' for OPP
> selection?

Hi Leo,

The idle injection task has a very low utilization when it is not in the
play_idle function, basically it wakes up, sets a timer and play_idle().

Regarding the use case, the idle injection is the base brick for an
combo cooling device with cpufreq + cpuidle. When the idle injection is
used alone, it is because there is no cpufreq driver for the platform.
If there is a cpufreq driver, then we should endup with the cpu cooling
device where we have control of the OPP (and there is no idle injection
threads) or the combo cooling device.

Except I'm missing something, the idle injection threads won't impact
the OPP selection.





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