Re: [RFC PATCH v3 05/10] sched/topology: Reference the Energy Model of CPUs when available

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Jun 19, 2018 at 02:24:49PM +0100, Quentin Perret wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 Jun 2018 at 14:26:32 (+0200), Peter Zijlstra wrote:

> > I'm confused by this patch,... what does it do? Why is em_cpu_get()
> > (after you fix it) not sufficient?
> 
> Hmm, so maybe the confusing part is that this patch does two things:
> 1. it checks all conditions for starting EAS are met
>   (SD_ASYM_CPUCAPACITY is set, the EM covers all online CPUs, the EM
>   isn't too complex to be used during wakeup);
> 2. it builds a list of frequency domains for the private use of the
>    scheduler in latency sensitive code paths,
  3. and sets the static key

> So I guess your question is more about 2. It is nice to have a list of
> frequency domains because that makes iteration over frequency domains
> in the wake-up path very easy, and efficient (for_each_freq_domain() is
> used in find_energy_efficient_cpu() and compute_energy(), patches 07 and
> 09/10).
> And also, by making the scheduler maintain that list, we can be more
> hotplug-aware. If you hotplug out all CPUs of a freq domain, the scheduler
> can remove it from its list and have one less element to iterate against.
> The idea was tp remove the unused things on hotplug, just like for
> sched domains.
> 
> I think that not having that list would mean to play with cpumasks in
> find_energy_efficient_cpu() and in compute_energy() to keep track of the
> CPUs we have visited and stuff like that. That's doable but probably more
> complex, and not more efficient, I think.
> 
> Is the overall idea any clearer ?

Right, so I would not do that many things at once. Also be more explicit
about what data structure, and why.

That said, I think the whole for_each_freq_domain() thing as done is
broken. You've completely ignored the arguments to
partition_sched_domains(). What happens if you create partitions right
along the frequency domains?

So you really want an argument to for_each_freq_domain() to indicate
who's frequency domains you want to iterate. And then I think it's
easiest if you hook into build_sched_domains() instead, because you
really want a list per root_domain I suspect (and an empty list if there
is but one entry on).