Re: [PATCH 0/3] cpufreq: Replace timers with utilization update callbacks

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 12:51 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 09, 2016 at 09:05:05PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
>> > > One concern I had was, given that the lone scheduler update hook is in
>> > > CFS, is it possible for governor updates to be stalled due to RT or DL
>> > > task activity?
>> >
>> > I don't think they may be completely stalled, but I'd prefer Peter to
>> > answer that as he suggested to do it this way.
>>
>> In any case, if that concern turns out to be significant in practice, it may
>> be addressed like in the appended modification of patch [1/3] from the $subject
>> series.
>>
>> With that things look like before from the cpufreq side, but the other sched
>> classes also get a chance to trigger a cpufreq update.  The drawback is the
>> cpu_clock() call instead of passing the time value from update_load_avg(), but
>> I guess we can live with that if necessary.
>>
>> FWIW, this modification doesn't seem to break things on my test machine.
>
> Not really pretty though. It blows a bit that you require this callback
> to be periodic (in order to replace a timer).

We need it for now, but that's because of how things work on the cpufreq side.

> Ideally we'd not have to call this if state doesn't change.

When cpufreq starts to use the util numbers, things will work like
that pretty much automatically.

We'll need to avoid thrashing if there are too many state changes over
a short time, but that's a different problem.

>> +++ linux-pm/include/linux/sched.h
>> @@ -3207,4 +3207,11 @@ static inline unsigned long rlimit_max(u
>>       return task_rlimit_max(current, limit);
>>  }
>>
>> +void cpufreq_update_util(unsigned long util, unsigned long max);
>
> Didn't you have a timestamp in there?

I did and I still do in fact.

The last version is here:

https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/8275271/

but it has the additional hooks for RT/DL which you seem to be
thinking are a mistake.

Thanks,
Rafael