Re: [PATCH 0/8] cpufreq: Auto-register with energy model

From: Lukasz Luba
Date: Tue Aug 10 2021 - 09:25:45 EST




On 8/10/21 1:35 PM, Quentin Perret wrote:
On Tuesday 10 Aug 2021 at 13:06:47 (+0530), Viresh Kumar wrote:
Provide a cpufreq driver flag so drivers can ask the cpufreq core to register
with the EM core on their behalf.

Hmm, that's not quite what this does. This asks the cpufreq core to
use *PM_OPP* to register an EM, which I think is kinda wrong to do from
there IMO. The decision to use PM_OPP or another mechanism to register
an EM belongs to platform specific code (drivers), so it is odd for the
PM_OPP registration to have its own cpufreq flag but not the other ways.

As mentioned in another thread, the very reason to have PM_EM is to not
depend on PM_OPP, so I'm worried about the direction of travel with this
series TBH.

This allows us to get rid of duplicated code
in the drivers and fix the unregistration part as well, which none of the
drivers have done until now.

This series adds more code than it removes, and the unregistration is
not a fix as we don't ever remove the EM tables by design, so not sure
either of these points are valid arguments.

This would also make the registration with EM core to happen only after policy
is fully initialized, and the EM core can do other stuff from in there, like
marking frequencies as inefficient (WIP). Though this patchset is useful without
that work being done and should be merged nevertheless.

This doesn't update scmi cpufreq driver for now as it is a special case and need
to be handled differently. Though we can make it work with this if required.

Note that we'll have more 'special cases' if other architectures start
using PM_EM, which is what we have been trying to allow since the
beginning, so that's worth keeping in mind.


The way I see this is that the flag in cpufreq avoids
mistakes potentially made by driver developer. It will automaticaly
register the *simple* EM model via dev_pm_opp_of_register_em() on behalf
of drivers (which is already done manually by drivers). The developer
would just set the flag similarly to CPUFREQ_IS_COOLING_DEV and be sure
it will register at the right time. Well tested flag approach should be
safer, easier to understand, maintain.

If there is a need for *advanced* EM model, driver developer would
have to care about all these things (order, setup-ready-structures,
fw channels, freeing, etc) while developing custom registration.
The developer won't set this flag in such case, so the core won't
try to auto register the EM for that driver.

I don't see the dependency of PM_EM on PM_OPP in this series.