Re: [PATCH 7/7] x86,idle: do not leave mm in idle state

[Rik van Riel]

On Fri, 2018-06-22 at 15:05 -0700, Andy Lutomirski wrote:

> I think the right solution if you want that last little bit of
> performance is to get rid of the code in intel_idle and to add it in
> the core idle code.  We have fancy scheduler code to estimate the
> idle
> time, and we should use it here IMO.

Good point.

However, I suspect we have some lower hanging
larger fruit to tackle first.

Every time we go into lazy TLB mode, we take
a refcount on the mm. Every time we leave lazy
TLB mode, we drop the refcount.

Every time we switch from the idle task to a
kernel thread, the kernel thread takes a
refcount, and the idle task drops it. Every
time we switch back, we do the same dance in
reverse.

I am working on a patch to grab the refcount
once, and hang onto it while a particular mm
is that CPU's lazy_mm.

We can release it when we switch to a task
with a different mm.

The patches we have so far get rid of a lot of
the pounding on mm_cpumask(mm).

That patch should help us also get rid of tasks
pounding on mm->count.

After that, the idle state thing is probably
of pretty small impact, though I suspect it will
still be worth tackling :)


As an aside, isn't the fancy CPU power management
stuff in the scheduler cpufreq, not cpuidle? The
cpuidle stuff in kernel/sched/idle.c looks like it
will just call down into the menu governor (and
maybe the ladder governor on some systems??)

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