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Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2013 10:36:59 -0700 (PDT)
From: David Lang <david@lang.hm>
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To: Preeti U Murthy <preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>, alex.shi@intel.com,
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        Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>,
        Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
        Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Subject: Re: power-efficient scheduling design
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On Fri, 7 Jun 2013, Preeti U Murthy wrote:

> Hi Catalin,
>
> On 06/07/2013 08:21 PM, Catalin Marinas wrote:
<SNIP>
>> Take the cpuidle example, it uses the load average of the CPUs,
>> however this load average is currently controlled by the scheduler
>> (load balance). Rather than using a load average that degrades over
>> time and gradually putting the CPU into deeper sleep states, the
>> scheduler could predict more accurately that a run-queue won't have
>> any work over the next x ms and ask for a deeper sleep state from the
>> beginning.
>
> How will the scheduler know that there will not be work in the near
> future? How will the scheduler ask for a deeper sleep state?
>
> My answer to the above two questions are, the scheduler cannot know how
> much work will come up. All it knows is the current load of the
> runqueues and the nature of the task (thanks to the PJT's metric). It
> can then match the task load to the cpu capacity and schedule the tasks
> on the appropriate cpus.

how will the cpuidle govenor know what will come up in the future?

the scheduler knows more than the current load on the runqueus, it tracks some 
information about the past behavior of the process that it uses for it's 
decisions. This is information that cpuidle doesn't have.

<SNIP>
> I don't see what the problem is with the cpuidle governor waiting for
> the load to degrade before putting that cpu to sleep. In my opinion,
> putting a cpu to deeper sleep states should happen gradually.

remember that it takes power and time to wake up a cpu to put it in a deeper 
sleep state.

>> Of course, you could export more scheduler information to cpuidle,
>> various hooks (task wakeup etc.) but then we have another framework,
>> cpufreq. It also decides the CPU parameters (frequency) based on the
>> load controlled by the scheduler. Can cpufreq decide whether it's
>> better to keep the CPU at higher frequency so that it gets to idle
>> quicker and therefore deeper sleep states? I don't think it has enough
>> information because there are at least three deciding factors
>> (cpufreq, cpuidle and scheduler's load balancing) which are not
>> unified.
>
> Why not? When the cpu load is high, cpu frequency governor knows it has
> to boost the frequency of that CPU. The task gets over quickly, the CPU
> goes idle. Then the cpuidle governor kicks in to put the CPU to deeper
> sleep state gradually.
>
> Meanwhile the scheduler should ensure that the tasks are retained on
> that CPU,whose frequency is boosted and should not load balance it, so
> that they can get over quickly. This I think is what is missing. Again
> this comes down to the scheduler taking feedback from the CPU frequency
> governors which is not currently happening.

how should the scheduler know that the cpufreq governor decided to boost the 
speed of one CPU to handle an important process as opposed to handling multiple 
smaller processes?

the communication between the two is starting to sound really messy

David Lang