Re: [PATCH 1/1] Honor state disabling in the cpuidle ladder governor
From: Carsten Emde
Date: Wed Jul 18 2012 - 07:12:12 EST
On 07/18/2012 08:36 AM, Deepthi Dharwar wrote:
On 07/18/2012 12:29 AM, Carsten Emde wrote:
There are two cpuidle governors ladder and menu. While the ladder
governor is always available, if CONFIG_CPU_IDLE is selected, the
menu governor additionally requires CONFIG_NO_HZ.
A particular C state can be disabled by writing to the sysfs file
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/cpuidle/stateN/disable, but this mechanism
is only implemented in the menu governor. Thus, in a system where
CONFIG_NO_HZ is not selected, the ladder governor becomes default and
always will walk through all sleep states - irrespective of whether the
C state was disabled via sysfs or not. The only way to select a specific
C state was to write the related latency to /dev/cpu_dma_latency and
keep the file open as long as this setting was required - not very
practical and not suitable for setting a single core in an SMP system.
With this patch, the ladder governor only will promote to the next
C state, if it has not been disabled, and it will demote, if the
current C state was disabled.
Yes, I agree that currently that disabling a particular C-state
is not reflected in working of ladder governor. This patch is needed
to fix it on ladder too.
Also wanted to clarify on the intended implementation here,
if there are say 5 C-states on a system, disabling 2nd
state would also end by disabling all the remaining 3 deeper states too
as ladder governor enters the lightest state first, and will only move
on to the next deeper state if a idle period was long enough as
per the implementation.
If one is disabling only the deepest state, then it would
work as intended.
Yes, the patch does not make the setting of the sysfs variable
"disable" coherent, i.e. if one is disabling a light state, then all
deeper states are disabled as well, but the "disable" variable does not
reflect it. Likewise, if one enables a deep state but a lighter state
still is disabled, then this has no effect.
I could implement a sanitize mechanism of the ladder governor that
takes care the "disable" variables of all deeper states are set to 1,
if a state is disabled, and those of all lighter states are set to 0,
if a state is enabled. Do you wish me to do that?
-Carsten.
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