Performance regression in v3.14

[Johan Hovold]

After updating my main system from v3.13 to v3.14.2, I found that the
git bash-completion was extremely sluggish. Completing a file name would
take roughly six rather than one second on this Haswell machine
(i7-4770). (Other things, such as git rebase, also felt slower, but
the completion issue was much more obvious and easy to measure).

I managed to reproduce the problem using the following minimal construct

	cat dmesg.repeat | while read x; do true; done

where dmesg.repeat is simply dmesg concatenated together to an
equivalent number of lines as produced by git ls-files in the
kernel-source tree root (45k), and where the actual processing of each
line has been removed.

Most of the time I get:

	$ time cat dmesg.repeat | while read x; do true; done

	real    0m6.091s
	user    0m3.674s
	sys     0m2.447s

but sometimes it only takes one second.

	$ time cat dmesg.repeat | while read x; do true; done

	real    0m1.100s
	user    0m0.544s
	sys     0m0.570s

I don't seem to be able to reproduce the problem on 3.13 where the pipe
always takes about one second to finish.

Taking all but one core offline seems to make the problem go away, and so
does using the performance rather than powersave governor of the
intel_pstate cpufreq driver (on at least one of two online cores).

Moving the mouse cursor makes to loop finish faster, and so does
switching to a another terminal to print cpufreq/cpuinfo_cur_freq which
was around cpuinfo_min_freq several times (when tracing, see below).

I could not reproduce the problem when using perf record, but I can get
function-profile traces using ftrace (in which case the loop takes about
60 seconds instead of six seconds to finish).

Comparing the traces I see a lot of functions taking ten times longer to
finish, but I guess that's expected if this is indeed a cpufreq issue.

Since this is my main machine (and only multi-core machine at the
moment) I'm not able to bisect this myself. And for the same reason I
have not verified that the problem persists in v3.15-rc.

I don't see any cpufreq patches in the v3.14.3 stable queue nor anything
obviously related and marked for stable in v3.15-rc.

Any ideas about what might be going on?

Thanks,
Johan
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