Re: [PATCH] PM / devfreq: Generic cpufreq governor

From: skannan
Date: Mon Jul 30 2018 - 14:58:41 EST


On 2018-07-29 03:52, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
On Sat, Jul 28, 2018 at 5:56 AM, Saravana Kannan <skannan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Many CPU architectures have caches that can scale independent of the CPUs.
Frequency scaling of the caches is necessary to make sure the cache is not
a performance bottleneck that leads to poor performance and power. The same
idea applies for RAM/DDR.

To achieve this, this patch adds a generic devfreq governor that can listen
to the frequency transitions of each CPU frequency domain and then adjusts
the frequency of the cache (or any devfreq device) based on the frequency
of the CPUs.

To decide the frequency of the device, the governor does one of the
following:

* Uses a CPU frequency to device frequency mapping table
- Either one mapping table used for all CPU freq policies (typically used
for system with homogeneous cores/clusters that have the same OPPs.
- One mapping table per CPU freq policy (typically used for ASMP systems
with heterogeneous CPUs with different OPPs)

OR

* Scales the device frequency in proportion to the CPU frequency. So, if
the CPUs are running at their max frequency, the device runs at its max
frequency. If the CPUs are running at their min frequency, the device
runs at its min frequency. And interpolated for frequencies in between.

While not having looked at the details of the patch yet, I would
change the name of the feature to "Generic cpufreq transition
governor" to make it somewhat less ambiguous.

In my opinion it makes it look MORE like this is a cpufreq governor. How about the following?
PM / devfreq: Generic cpufreq to devfreq mapping governor
Seem a lot more clear to me.

I'm open to suggestions for the devfreq governor name too. "cpufreq" has been very confusing so far.
cpufreq-map maybe?

Thanks,
Saravana