Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] Introduce thermal pressure

[Javi Merino]

On Tue, Oct 09, 2018 at 12:24:55PM -0400, Thara Gopinath wrote:
> Thermal governors can respond to an overheat event for a cpu by
> capping the cpu's maximum possible frequency. This in turn
> means that the maximum available compute capacity of the
> cpu is restricted. But today in linux kernel, in event of maximum
> frequency capping of a cpu, the maximum available compute
> capacity of the cpu is not adjusted at all. In other words, scheduler
> is unware maximum cpu capacity restrictions placed due to thermal
> activity.

Interesting, I would have sworn that I tested this years ago by
lowering the maximum frequency of a cpufreq domain, and the scheduler
reacted accordingly to the new maximum capacities of the cpus.

>           This patch series attempts to address this issue.
> The benefits identified are better task placement among available
> cpus in event of overheating which in turn leads to better
> performance numbers.
> 
> The delta between the maximum possible capacity of a cpu and
> maximum available capacity of a cpu due to thermal event can
> be considered as thermal pressure. Instantaneous thermal pressure
> is hard to record and can sometime be erroneous as there can be mismatch
> between the actual capping of capacity and scheduler recording it.
> Thus solution is to have a weighted average per cpu value for thermal
> pressure over time. The weight reflects the amount of time the cpu has
> spent at a capped maximum frequency. To accumulate, average and
> appropriately decay thermal pressure, this patch series uses pelt
> signals and reuses the available framework that does a similar
> bookkeeping of rt/dl task utilization.
> 
> Regarding testing, basic build, boot and sanity testing have been
> performed on hikey960 mainline kernel with debian file system.
> Further aobench (An occlusion renderer for benchmarking realworld
> floating point performance) showed the following results on hikey960
> with debain.
> 
>                                         Result          Standard        Standard
>                                         (Time secs)     Error           Deviation
> Hikey 960 - no thermal pressure applied 138.67          6.52            11.52%
> Hikey 960 -  thermal pressure applied   122.37          5.78            11.57%
> 
> Thara Gopinath (7):
>   sched/pelt: Add option to make load and util calculations frequency
>     invariant
>   sched/pelt.c: Add support to track thermal pressure
>   sched: Add infrastructure to store and update instantaneous thermal
>     pressure
>   sched: Initialize per cpu thermal pressure structure
>   sched/fair: Enable CFS periodic tick to update thermal pressure
>   sched/fair: update cpu_capcity to reflect thermal pressure
>   thermal/cpu-cooling: Update thermal pressure in case of a maximum
>     frequency capping
> 
>  drivers/base/arch_topology.c  |  1 +
>  drivers/thermal/cpu_cooling.c | 20 ++++++++++++-

thermal?  There are other ways in which the maximum frequency of a cpu
can be limited, for example from userspace via scaling_max_freq.

When something (anything) changes the maximum frequency of a cpufreq
policy, the scheduler should be notified.  I think this change should
be done in cpufreq instead to make it generic and not particular to
a given maximum frequency "capper".

Cheers,
Javi