Re: [alsa-devel] [PATCH] ASoC: core: Don't schedule DAPM work if already in target state

[Jon Hunter]

On 28/08/18 11:39, Charles Keepax wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 17, 2018 at 04:35:43PM +0100, Jon Hunter wrote:
>> When dapm_power_widgets() is called, the dapm_pre_sequence_async() and
>> dapm_post_sequence_async() functions are scheduled for all DAPM contexts
>> (apart from the card DAPM context) regardless of whether the DAPM
>> context is already in the desired state. The overhead of this is not
>> insignificant and the more DAPM contexts there are the more overhead
>> there is.
>>
>> For example, on the Tegra124 Jetson TK1, when profiling the time taken
>> to execute the dapm_power_widgets() the following times were observed.
>>
>>   Times for function dapm_power_widgets() are (us):
>>      Min 23, Ave 190, Max 434, Count 39
>>
>> Here 'Count' is the number of times that dapm_power_widgets() has been
>> called. Please note that the above time were measured using ktime_get()
>> to log the time on entry and exit from dapm_power_widgets(). So it
>> should be noted that these times may not be purely the time take to
>> execute this function if it is preempted. However, after applying this
>> patch and measuring the time taken to execute dapm_power_widgets() again
>> a significant improvement is seen as shown below.
>>
>>   Times for function dapm_power_widgets() are (us):
>>      Min 4, Ave 16, Max 82, Count 39
>>
>> Therefore, optimise the dapm_power_widgets() function by only scheduling
>> the dapm_pre/post_sequence_async() work if the DAPM context is not in
>> the desired state.
>>
>> Signed-off-by: Jon Hunter <jonathanh@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> ---
> 
> Looks ok to me:
> 
> Reviewed-by: Charles Keepax <ckeepax@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> Although that said the performance increase is pretty hard to
> measure on my systems.

If you can enable the function graph tracer, then you should be again to
profile the dapm_power_widgets() function with it as it will give you a
time for how long the function took [0].

Cheers
Jon

[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/370423/

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