Re: RCU vs NOHZ

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 12:56:41PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 09:08:42PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 29, 2022 at 09:36:24AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > 
> > > > How has this been tried; and why did the energy cost go up? Is this
> > > > because the offload thread ends up waking up the CPU we just put to
> > > > sleep?
> > > 
> > > Because doing the additional work consumes energy.  I am not clear on
> > > exactly what you are asking for here, given the limitations of the tools
> > > that measure energy consumption.
> > 
> > What additional work? Splicing the cpu pending list onto another list
> > with or without atomic op barely qualifies for work. The main point is
> > making sure the pending list isn't in the way of going (deep) idle.
> 
> Very good.  Send a patch.
> 
> After some time, its successor might correctly handle lock/memory
> contention, CPU hotplug, presumed upcoming runtime changes in CPUs'
> housekeeping status, frequent idle entry/exit, grace period begin/end,
> quiet embedded systems, and so on.
> 
> Then we can see if it actually reduces power consumption.

Another approach is to runtime-offload CPUs that have been mostly idle,
and switch back to deoffloaded during busy periods.

							Thanx, Paul