Re: [PATCH v2 0/2] drivers: devfreq: fix and optimize workqueue mechanism

[Matthias Kaehlcke]

Hi Lukasz,

On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 02:00:26PM +0100, Lukasz Luba wrote:
> Hi Matthias,
> 
> On 2/13/19 1:30 AM, Matthias Kaehlcke wrote:
> > Hi Lukasz,
> > 
> > On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 10:20:07PM +0100, Lukasz Luba wrote:
> >> Hi Matthias,
> >>
> >> On 2/12/19 8:32 PM, Matthias Kaehlcke wrote:
> >>> Hi,
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 02:46:24PM +0900, Chanwoo Choi wrote:
> >>>> Hi Lukasz,
> >>>>
> >>>> On 19. 2. 12. ìì 12:30, Lukasz Luba wrote:
> >>>>> This patch set changes workqueue related features in devfreq framework.
> >>>>> First patch switches to delayed work instead of deferred.
> >>>>> The second switches to regular system work and deletes custom 'devfreq'.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Using deferred work in this context might harm the system performance.
> >>>>> When the CPU enters idle, deferred work is not fired. The devfreq device's
> >>>>> utilization does not have to be connected with a particular CPU.
> >>>>> The drivers for GPUs, Network on Chip, cache L3 rely on devfreq governor.
> >>>>> They all are missing opportunity to check the HW state and react when
> >>>>> the deferred work is not fired.
> >>>>> A corner test case, when Dynamic Memory Controller is utilized by CPUs running
> >>>>> on full speed, might show x5 worse performance if the crucial CPU is in idle.
> >>>>
> >>>> The devfreq framework keeps the balancing between performance
> >>>> and power-consumption. It is wrong to focus on only either
> >>>> performance or power.
> >>>>
> >>>> This cover-letter focus on the only performance without any power-consumption
> >>>> disadvantages. It is easy to raise the performance with short sampling rate
> >>>> with polling modes. To get the performance, it is good as short as possible
> >>>> of period.
> >>>>
> >>>> Sometimes, when cpu is idle, the device might require the busy state.
> >>>> It is very difficult to catch the always right timing between them.
> >>>>
> >>>> Also, this patch cannot prevent the unneeded wakeup from idle state.
> >>>> Apparently, it only focuses on performance without considering
> >>>> the power-consumption disadvantage. In the embedded device,
> >>>> the power-consumption is very important point. We can not ignore
> >>>> the side effect.
> >>>>
> >>>> Always, I hope to improve the devfreq framwork more that older.
> >>>> But, frankly, it is difficult to agree because it only consider
> >>>> the performance without considering the side-effect.
> >>>>
> >>>> The power management framework always have to consider
> >>>> the power-consumption issue. This point is always true.
> >>>
> >>> I missed the impact of forcing a CPU out of an idle state and/or not
> >>> allowing it to enter a more power efficient state. I agree that this
> >>> should be avoided.
> >> It would be good to have some real world scenarios for comparison:
> >> w/ and w/o this change, i.e. it is 5% or 50% more power used.
> > 
> > If you have data please share :)
> I will try to measure it. I have some data which refer to CPU hotplug
> and generic data regarding ARM big.LITTLE.
> It is a mobile on my desk.
> When one CPU of ARM big is sent offline power drops ~12mW comparing
> to WFI idle which was previous state. The same for LITTLE ~12mW.
> When the last CPU in the cluster is sent offline, whole culster
> is switched off and power drops ~50mW.
> The LITTLE core can consume ~250mW at max speed.
> Energy Aware Scheduler is now merged IIRC, so if it has to choose
> which core wake up for idle, it will take LITTLE not big.

I'm not sure that EAS will make a difference in this case:

"We queue the work to the CPU on which it was submitted, but if the
CPU dies it can be processed by another CPU." (queue_work() comment).

> For older platforms which has Cortex-A9 500mW is also better estimation.
> 
> > 
> > Though I also imagine there will be quite some variation between
> > different systems/platforms.
> True.
> > 
> >> I have patches that tries to mitigate wake-ups when there is small
> >> utilization. Let's make it tunable and involve driver developers.
> >> They will decide how much impact on the system power usage they
> >> introduce.
> > 
> > Great!
> > 
> >>> I wonder if using a power-efficient workqueue could help here:
> >>>
> >>>     Instead of running work on the local CPU, the workqueue core asks the
> >>>     scheduler to provide the target CPU for the work queued on unbound
> >>>     workqueues (which includes those marked as power-efficient). So they
> >>>     will not get pinned on a single CPU as can happen with regular
> >>>     workqueues.
> >>>
> >>>     https://lwn.net/Articles/731052/
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Since this series also changes from a custom to system workqueue it
> >>> seems worth to mention that there are power-efficient system workqueues:
> >>>
> >>> system_power_efficient_wq
> >>> system_freezable_power_efficient_wq
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> In case a power-efficient workqueue is suitable in principle there
> >>> would still be a problem though: the feature is currently disabled by
> >>> default, hence devfreq couldn't really rely on it. It is enabled in
> >>> the arm64 defconfig though, so at least devices on this architecture
> >>> would benefit from it. Also power-efficient workqueues might be
> >>> enabled by default in the future as the scheduler becomes more energy
> >>> aware.
> >> Regarding this CPU idle cost worries.
> >> IIRC the new energy model does not even consider idle costs of the CPU.
> >> It would be good to know the measurements, i.e. worst case scenario:
> >> waking up 1 (of 4 or 8) CPU from idle 30 times per second for let's
> >> say 100 us. It is 3 ms / 1000 ms * running energy cost i.e. 250mW.
> >> Thus, 0.75mW.
> > 
> > I'm not an expert in this area, but your example seems too optimistic
> > You are just accounting for the pure runtime, not for the cost of
> > entering and exiting an idle state. Let's take a SDM845 idle state as
> > example:
> > 
> > C0_CPU_PD: c0-power-down {
> >    ...
> >    entry-latency-us = <350>;
> >    exit-latency-us = <461>;
> >    min-residency-us = <1890>;
> >    ...
> > };
> > 
> > https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/10661319/
> > 
> > That's 811us for entering and exiting the idle state. At an
> > intermediate OPP (1.8 GHz) the power consumption is 505mW, according
> > to the Energy Model. I'm ignoring the actual execution time, since I
> > tend to agree with you that the monitoring should be done, unless it
> > has a really unreasonable cost. That leaves us with 30 * 811us =
> > 24.3ms and 24.3ms / 1000 ms * 505mW = 12.3mW.
> You are probably taking ARM 'big' core wake-up from deeper that WFI 
> idle. I was referring to ARM LITTLE 250mW.

Yes, it's a big core in a deep state.

> It is also not 100% that the schedule work will wake up CPU which
> is currently in deepest idle.

true :)

> A short array would create a better picture of the use cases.
> The question is also probability of occurrence for each of these cases.
> For first two CPU state it would be a power cost lost during additional
> rescheduling to/from workqueue task, which takes i.e. 2*5 us * 30 times.
> 
> CPU state ->|  running | idle    | idle clock | idle, pwr  |
> ------------|   (C0)   | WFI (C1)|  gated (C2)| gated (C3) |
> architecture|          |         |            |            |
> ------V-----------------------------------------------------
> ARM big     |    <1mW  | <1mW    |   ~12mW    |  ~12mW     |
> ARM LITTLE  |    <1mW  | <1mW    |   ~6mW     |  ~6mW      |
> MIPS
> PowerPC
> 
> 
> > 
> >> In my opinion it is not a big cost. In most cases the system is still
> >> doing some other work. It is worth to mention here that on mobiles
> >> when the power button is hit the full suspend is called which freezes
> >> all tasks, devices and power consumption is ~15mW. Thus, the system
> >> suspend is out of scope here.
> > 
> > I agree that system suspend is out of scope.
> > 
> >> As I replayed to Chanwoon for the same email: in my opinion current
> >> devfreq is broken.
> >> It was probably developed in times where there was 1 CPU (maybe 2)
> >> and idle state of CPU would be a good hint to not to check devfreq
> >> devices.
> > 
> > IIUC the use of a power-efficient workqueues would address the problem
> > of waking up a CPU in idle state, however as mentioned earlier by
> > default this feature is disabled (except for arm64). How about
> > switching to system_power_efficient_wq and use INIT_DELAYED_WORK if
> > CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT=y (or check if the workqueue in
> > question has WQ_UNBOUND set?) and INIT_DEFERRABLE_WORK otherwise? It's
> > not ideal, but a possible improvement.
> I think it would be to complicated to maintain because different
> platforms might use different mechanisms.
> I would suggests that we could just follow mechanism in thermal
> framework. I have never faced any issue with delayed work there,
> while working on IPA.
> They use 'system_freezable_power_efficient_wq' and INIT_DELAYED_WORK().
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.0-rc6/source/drivers/thermal/thermal_core.c#L293
> https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/v5.0-rc6/source/drivers/thermal/thermal_core.c#L1281
> They have these two polling intervals, though.

I think system_power_efficient_wq would be suitable if load monitoring
is stopped on suspend.

In any case it seems Chanwoo wants you to keep providing at least the
option of using a deferrable work. If you end up doing that it
probably would make sense to use always a delayed work for
CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT=y.

Cheers

Matthias