Re: [PATCH v1 0/4] cpufreq: Allow drivers to receive more information from the governor

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Fri Dec 18 2020 - 10:34:04 EST


On Tue, Dec 08, 2020 at 11:14:36AM -0800, Doug Smythies wrote:
> At least on my system, it is most evident for some of the pipe type tests,
> where the schedutil governor has never really known what to do. This patch
> set seems to add enough of a downward bias that this version of the schedutil
> governor now behaves much like the other versions

Yeah, pipe relies on task-task interaction, where one task waits on
another, and by boosting the producer the consumer can start earlier and
we get more cycles done etc.. Rather similar to IO-wait, where by
boosting the producer we gain throughput.

schedutil doesn't track anything useful here, but it is a semi common
pattern and it would be really good if we could somehow fix this.

We obviously have access to the task A wakes task B information, but I'm
not sure what to do with it, we're tried some things like this in the
past (although for slightly different reasons) and they've always ended
up being a mess :/