Re: [RFC/RFT][PATCH 4/7] cpuidle: menu: Split idle duration prediction from state selection

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Mon, Mar 05, 2018 at 12:47:23PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 5, 2018 at 12:38 PM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > We really should be predicting state not duration. Yes the duration
> > thing is an intermediate value, but I don't think it makes any sense
> > what so ever to preserve that in the predictor. The end result is the
> > idle state, we should aim for that.
> >
> > As per:
> >
> >   https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/7/18/615
> >
> > there are definite advantages to _not_ preserving duration information
> > beyond the state boundaries.
> 
> Well, OK
> 
> The reason why I need the predicted idle duration is because the
> target residency of the selected state may be below the tick period
> duration and if this is the deepest state available, we still want to
> stop the tick if the predicted idle duration is long.

Right, so in that case we'd split the deepest state and mark the
resulting smaller state as not disabling the tick and the resulting
larger state as disabling the tick.

So suppose your deepest state is < TICK_USEC, then we introduce a copy
of that state, modify the boundary to be TICK_USEC and set the 'disable
tick for this state' thing to true.

> IOW, the target residency of the selected state doesn't tell you how
> much time you should expect to be idle in general.

Right, but I think that measure isn't of primary relevance. What we want
to know is: 'should I stop the tick' and 'what C state do I go to'.

In order to answer those questions we need durations as input, but I
don't think we should preserve durations throughout. The scheme from the
above link reduces to N states in order to deal with arbitrary
distributions, only the actual states -- ie boundaries where our answers
changes -- are relevant, anything inside those boundaries would lead to
the exact same answer anyway.