Re: [PATCH 0/3] drivers: Frequency constraint infrastructure

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Thu, Jan 17, 2019 at 2:16 PM Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 11/01/19 10:47, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 11, 2019 at 10:18 AM Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > This commit introduces the frequency constraint infrastructure, which
> > > provides a generic interface for parts of the kernel to constraint the
> > > working frequency range of a device.
> > >
> > > The primary users of this are the cpufreq and devfreq frameworks. The
> > > cpufreq framework already implements such constraints with help of
> > > notifier chains (for thermal and other constraints) and some local code
> > > (for user-space constraints). The devfreq framework developers have also
> > > shown interest [1] in such a framework, which may use it at a later
> > > point of time.
> > >
> > > The idea here is to provide a generic interface and get rid of the
> > > notifier based mechanism.
> > >
> > > Only one constraint is added for now for the cpufreq framework and the
> > > rest will follow after this stuff is merged.
> > >
> > > Matthias Kaehlcke was involved in the preparation of the first draft of
> > > this work and so I have added him as Co-author to the first patch.
> > > Thanks Matthias.
> > >
> > > FWIW, This doesn't have anything to do with the boot-constraints
> > > framework [2] I was trying to upstream earlier :)
> >
> > This is quite a bit of code to review, so it will take some time.
> >
> > One immediate observation is that it seems to do quite a bit of what
> > is done in the PM QoS framework, so maybe there is an opportunity for
> > some consolidation in there.
>
> Right, had the same impression. :-)
>
> I was also wondering how this new framework is dealing with
> constraints/request imposed/generated by the scheduler and related
> interfaces (thinking about schedutil and Patrick's util_clamp).

My understanding is that it is orthogonal to them, like adding extra
constraints on top of them etc.