Re: [RFC][PATCH 08/10] sched/fair: Implement delayed dequeue

[Luis Machado]

On 4/25/24 11:42, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 24, 2024 at 04:15:42PM +0100, Luis Machado wrote:
> 
>>> Bisecting through the patches in this series, I ended up with patch 08/10
>>> as the one that improved things overall for these benchmarks.
>>>
>>> I'd like to investigate this further to understand the reason behind some of
>>> these dramatic improvements.
>>>
>>
>> Investigating these improvements a bit more, I noticed they came with a significantly
>> higher power usage on the Pixel6 (where EAS is enabled). I bisected it down to the delayed
>> dequeue patch. Disabling DELAY_DEQUEUE and DELAY_ZERO at runtime doesn't help in bringing
>> the power usage down.
> 
> Hmm, that is unexpected. The intent was for NO_DELAY_DEQUEUE to fully
> disable things. I'll go have a prod at it.

I'm running a few more numbers to confirm this situation with the feature switches.

> 
>> Though I don't fully understand the reason behind this change in behavior yet, I did spot
>> the benchmark processes running almost entirely on the big core cluster, with little
>> to no use of the little core and mid core clusters.
>>
>> That would explain higher power usage and also the significant jump in performance.
> 
> ISTR you (arm) has these tools to trace and plot the varioud util
> values. This should be readily reflected there if that is the case, no?

Indeed we do, but I'm still in the process of compiling those numbers into a meaningful plot,
so I'm afraid I don't have those handy yet, sorry.

> 
>> I wonder if the delayed dequeue logic is having an unwanted effect on the calculation of
>> utilization/load of the runqueue and, as a consequence, we're scheduling things to run on
>> higher OPP's in the big cores, leading to poor decisions for energy efficiency.
> 
> Notably util_est_update() gets delayed. Given we don't actually do an
> enqueue when a delayed task gets woken, it didn't seem to make sense to
> update that sooner.
> 
> I'll go over all that again