Re: [PATCH v2] cpuidle: poll_state: Add time limit to poll_idle()

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Thu, Mar 22, 2018 at 5:32 PM, Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Wed, 2018-03-14 at 13:04 +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
>> On x86 we don't have to use that time_check_counter thing,
>> sched_clock()
>> is really cheap, not sure if it makes sense on other platforms.
>
> Are you sure? I saw a 5-10% increase in CPU use,
> for a constant query rate to a memcache style
> workload, with v3 of this patch.

I think I know what's going on.

Increased utilization with the same amount of work per time unit (and
I guess that's the case given the lack of specific information about
the workload) means more non-idle time with respect to total time and
that implies reduced frequency (eg. less turbo).

Now, combine that with the Doug's observation that limiting the rate
of local_clock() invocations in the poll_idle() loop reduces power
draw during experiments on his system significantly and with the other
one that in both cases local_lock() ends up being rdtsc() (most
likely).

What this implies to me is that invoking rdtsc() at a high rate on
multiple logical CPUs in parallel causes chips to get hot.  Actually
that may be so hot that they hit power/thremal (eg. RAPL) limits and
get their frequency reduced as a result.

Limiting the rate of local_clock() invocations obviously avoids this issue.