Re: [PATCH] Revert "sched/fair: Fix O(nr_cgroups) in the load balancing path"

[Vincent Guittot]

Hi Doug,

On Sat, 9 Nov 2019 at 17:47, Doug Smythies <dsmythies@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi Vincent,
>
> Thank you for your item 2 patch.
>
> On 2019.11.08 01:19 Vincent Guittot wrote:
> ...
> >> I have to prepare a patch for this part which is item 2
> >
> > I have finally been able to prepared the patch for item 2. Could you check
> > that it also fixes your problem ?
> ...
> > We can still have some spurious call to cpufreq_util_change in
> > update_blocked_average() with this patch but at least the value will be
> > up to date in both calls, which was not the case before. If this fix
> > Doug's problem, I can prepare an additional one to fix the spurious call
> > but I wanted to make sure that this fix the problem first.
>
> Yes, the issue is solved with this patch.

Thanks for your tests

> I do wonder if I am seeing the effect of the spurious calls.

I don't think so because the spurious calls are in fact a 2nd call
during the same update_blocked_average and from what i have seen ,
intel pstate driver filter call when there is less than 3 or 10ms
between the 2 calls

>
> Details:
>
> Test 1: an 8000 second trace during system idle:
> Maximum duration: 4.00015 seconds. Good.
> Typically, there would have been about 300 durations
> of over 10 seconds in 8000 seconds.
> Number of calls to driver: 103168, which is about 8% more than
> the previous experimental solution.
> (Should be repeated a few times to verify repeatability, but
> not going to.)
>
> Test 2: one 8000 second energy sample, for high accuracy idle power:
> 3.703 watts which is about +0.7% idle power increase.
>
> Test 3: The load-no-load test with only idle state 1 enabled:
> There was never an excessive energy sample for the no load samples.
> The test ran for about 8 hours.
> Maximum: 9.49 watts
> Minimum: 9.13 watts
> Recall that with the issue, the max would have been about 14 watts
>
> Kernel: 5.4-rc6 + your items 1 and item 2 patches.
> Idle governor = menu, because teo fixes are still pending.
> Note: some reference data is from kernel 5.4-rc2, and really
> should have been re-done with 5.4-rc6 as the baseline.
>
> ... Doug
>
>