Re: [RFC/RFT][PATCH v6] cpuidle: New timer events oriented governor for tickless systems

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

Hi Doug,

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 12:20 AM Doug Smythies <dsmythies@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 2018.11.23 02:36 Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
>
> v5 -> v6:
>  * Avoid applying poll_time_limit to non-polling idle states by mistake.
>  * Use idle duration measured by the governor for everything (as it likely is
>    more accurate than the one measured by the core).
>
> -- above missing-- (see follow up e-mail from Rafael)
>
>  * Rename SPIKE to PULSE.
>  * Do not run pattern detection upfront.  Instead, use recent idle duration
>    values to refine the state selection after finding a candidate idle state.
>  * Do not use the expected idle duration as an extra latency constraint
>    (exit latency is less than the target residency for all of the idle states
>    known to me anyway, so this doesn't change anything in practice).
>
> Hi Rafael,
>
> I did some minimal testing on teov6, using kernel 4.20-rc3 as my baseline
> reference kernel.
>
> Test 1: Phoronix bdench test, all options: 1, 6, 12, 48, 128, 256 clients.
>
> Note: because it uses the disk, the dbench test is somewhat non-repeatable.
> However, if particular attention is paid to not doing anything else with
> the disk between tests, then it seems to be repeatable to within about 6%.
>
> Anyway no significant difference observed between kernel 4.20-rc3 and the
> same with the teov6 patch.
>
> Test 2: Pipe test, non cross core. (And idle state 0 test, really)
> I ran 4 pipe tests, 1 for each of my 4 cores, @2 CPUs per core.
> Thus, pretty much only idle state 0 was ever used.
> Processor package power was similar for both kernels.
> teov6 entered/exited idle state 0 about 60,984 times/second/cpu.
> -rc3 entered/exited idle state 0 about 62,806 times/second/cpu.
> There was a difference in percentage time spent in idle state 0,
> with kernel 4.20-rc3 spending 0.2441% in idle state 0 verses
> teov6 at 0.0641%.
>
> For throughput, teov6 was 1.4% faster.
>
> Test 3: was an attempt to sweep through a preference for
> all idle states.
>
> 40 threads were launched with nothing to do except sleep
> for a variable duration of 1 to 500 uSec, each step was
> run for 1 minute. With 1 minute idle before the test and a few
> minutes idle after, the total test duration was about 505 minutes.
> Recall that when one asks for a short sleep of 1 uSec, they actually
> get about 50 uSec, due to overheads. So I use 40 threads in an attempt
> to get the average time between wakeup events per CPU down somewhat.
>
> The results are here:
> http://fast.smythies.com/linux-pm/k420/k420-pn-sweep-teo6-2.htm
>
> I might try to get some histogram information at a later date.

Thank you for the results, much appreciated!