Re: [RFC][PATCH 0/9] sched: Power scheduler design proposal

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Sat, Jul 13, 2013 at 11:23:51AM +0100, Catalin Marinas wrote:
> > This looks like a userspace hotplug deamon approach lifted to kernel space :/
> 
> The difference is that this is faster. We even had hotplug in mind some
> years ago for big.LITTLE but it wouldn't give the performance we need
> (hotplug is incredibly slow even if driven from the kernel).

faster, slower, still horrid :-)

> That's what we've been pushing for. From a big.LITTLE perspective, I
> would probably vote for Vincent's patches but I guess we could probably
> adapt any of the other options.
> 
> But then we got Ingo NAK'ing all these approaches. Taking the best bits
> from the current load balancing patches would create yet another set of
> patches which don't fall under Ingo's requirements (at least as I
> understand them).

Right, so Ingo is currently away as well -- should be back 'today' or tomorrow.
But I suspect he mostly fell over the presentation. 

I've never known Ingo to object to doing incremental development; in fact he
often suggests doing so.

So don't present the packing thing as a power aware scheduler; that
presentation suggests its the complete deal. Give instead a complete
description of the problem; and tell how the current patch set fits into that
and which aspect it solves; and that further patches will follow to sort the
other issues.

That keeps the entire thing much clearer.

> > Then worry about power thingies.
> 
> To quote Ingo: "To create a new low level idle driver mechanism the
> scheduler could use and integrate proper power saving / idle policy into
> the scheduler."
> 
> That's unless we all agree (including Ingo) that the above requirement
> is orthogonal to task packing and, as a *separate* project, we look at
> better integrating the cpufreq/cpuidle with the scheduler, possibly with
> a new driver model and governors as libraries used by such drivers. In
> which case the current packing patches shouldn't be NAK'ed but reviewed
> so that they can be improved further or rewritten.

Right, so first thing would be to list all the thing that need doing:

 - integrate idle guestimator
 - intergrate cpufreq stats
 - fix per entity runtime vs cpufreq
 - intrgrate/redo cpufreq
 - add packing features
 - {all the stuff I forgot}

Then see what is orthogonal and what is most important and get people to agree
to an order. Then go..

> I agree in general but there is the intel_pstate.c driver which has it's
> own separate statistics that the scheduler does not track. 

Right, question is how much of that will survive Arjan next-gen effort.

> We could move
> to invariant task load tracking which uses aperf/mperf (and could do
> similar things with perf counters on ARM). As I understand from Arjan,
> the new pstate driver will be different, so we don't know exactly what
> it requires.

Right, so part of the effort should be understanding what the various parties
want/need. As far as I understand the Intel stuff, P states are basically
useless and the only useful state to ever program is the max one -- although
I'm sure Arjan will eventually explain how that is wrong :-)

We could do optional things; I'm not much for 'requiring' stuff that other
arch simply cannot support, or only support at great effort/cost.

Stealing PMU counters for sched work would be crossing the line for me, that
must be optional.
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