Re: [RFC/RFT][PATCH v3] cpuidle: New timer events oriented governor for tickless systems

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Tue, Nov 06, 2018 at 07:19:24PM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 6:04 PM Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > Instead of this detector; why haven't you used the code from
> > kernel/irq/timings.c ?
> 
> Because it doesn't help much AFAICS.
> 
> Wakeups need not be interrupts in particular 

You're alluding to the MWAIT wakeup through the MONITOR address ?

> and interrupt patterns that show up when the CPU is busy may not be
> relevant for when it is idle.

I think that is not always true; consider things like the periodic
interrupt from frame rendering or audio; if there is nothing more going
on in the system than say playing your favourite tune, it gets the
'need more data soon' interrupt from the audio card, wakes up, does a little
mp3/flac/ogg/whatever decode to fill up the buffer and goes back to
sleep. Same for video playback I assume, the vsync interrupt for buffer
flips is fairly predictable.

The interrupt predictor we have in kernel/irq/timings.c should be very
accurate in predicting those interrupts.