Subject: Re: PM regression with LED changes in next-20161109
To: Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>,
        Jacek Anaszewski <jacek.anaszewski@gmail.com>,
        Tony Lindgren <tony@atomide.com>
Cc: linux-leds@vger.kernel.org, linux-omap@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Darren Hart <dvhart@infradead.org>, Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
From: Jacek Anaszewski <j.anaszewski@samsung.com>
Message-id: <5bd5333e-0dbb-6333-0a48-ca4d3a990f9c@samsung.com>
Date: Thu, 10 Nov 2016 13:56:27 +0100
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Hi,

On 11/10/2016 09:49 AM, Hans de Goede wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 09-11-16 21:45, Jacek Anaszewski wrote:
>> Hi Tony,
>>
>> On 11/09/2016 08:23 PM, Tony Lindgren wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Looks like commit 883d32ce3385 ("leds: core: Add support for poll()ing
>>> the sysfs brightness attr for changes.") breaks runtime PM for me.
>>>
>>> On my omap dm3730 based test system, idle power consumption is over 70
>>> times higher now with this patch! It goes from about 6mW for the core
>>> system to over 440mW during idle meaning there's some busy timer now
>>> active.
>>>
>>> Reverting this patch fixes the issue. Any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks for the report. This is probably caused by sysfs_notify_dirent().
>> I'm afraid that we can't keep this feature in the current shape.
>> Hans, I'm dropping the patch. We probably will have to delegate this
>> call to a workqueue task. Think about use cases when the LED is blinked
>> with high frequency e.g. from ledtrig-disk.c.
>
> sysfs_notify_dirent() already uses a workqueue, here is the actual
> implementation of it (from fs/kernfs/file.c) :
>
> void kernfs_notify(struct kernfs_node *kn)
> {
>         static DECLARE_WORK(kernfs_notify_work, kernfs_notify_workfn);
>         unsigned long flags;
>
>         if (WARN_ON(kernfs_type(kn) != KERNFS_FILE))
>                 return;
>
>         spin_lock_irqsave(&kernfs_notify_lock, flags);
>         if (!kn->attr.notify_next) {
>                 kernfs_get(kn);
>                 kn->attr.notify_next = kernfs_notify_list;
>                 kernfs_notify_list = kn;
>                 schedule_work(&kernfs_notify_work);
>         }
>         spin_unlock_irqrestore(&kernfs_notify_lock, flags);
> }

Indeed. As a next step of this investigation Tony could disable
particular calls made in kernfs_notify_workfn to check what
exactly causes excessive power consumption.

> So using a workqueue is not going to help. Note that I already
> feared this, which is why my initial implementation only called
> sysfs_notify_dirent() for user initiated changes and not for
> triggers / blinking.

AFAIR there were no calls to led_notify_brightness_change() in
the initial implementation and it was entirely predestined for
being called by LED class drivers on brightness changes made
by firmware.

> I think we may need to reconsider what getting the brightness
> sysfs atrribute actually returns. Currently when a LED is
> blinking it will return 0 resp. the actual brightness depending
> on when in the blink cycle the user reads the brightness
> sysfs atrribute.
>
> So a user can do "echo 128 > brightness && cat brightness" and
> get out 0, or 128, depending purely on timing.
>
> This seems to contradict what Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class-led
> has to say:
>
> What:           /sys/class/leds/<led>/brightness
> Date:           March 2006
> KernelVersion:  2.6.17
> Contact:        Richard Purdie <rpurdie@rpsys.net>
> Description:
>                 Set the brightness of the LED. Most LEDs don't
>                 have hardware brightness support, so will just be turned
> on for
>                 non-zero brightness settings. The value is between 0 and
>                 /sys/class/leds/<led>/max_brightness.
>
>                 Writing 0 to this file clears active trigger.
>
>                 Writing non-zero to this file while trigger is active
> changes the
>                 top brightness trigger is going to use.
>
> Even though it only talks about writing, the logical thing would be for
> reading to be the exact opposite of writing, so we would get:
>
>                 Reading from this file while a trigger is active returns
> the
>                 top brightness trigger is going to use.
>
> The current docs say not about (sw) blinking, but that should be treated
> just
> like a trigger IMHO.

You'r right, we should describe the semantics on reading, but it would
have to be as follows:

Reading from this file returns LED brightness at given moment, i.e.
even though LED class device brightness setting is greater than 0, the
momentary brightness can be 0 if the readout occurred during low phase
of blink cycle.

> If we can get consensus on what the read behavior for the brightness
> attribute
> should be, then I think that a better poll() behavior will automatically
> follow
> from that.

It seems that we should get back to your initial approach. i.e. only
brightness changes caused by hardware should be reported.

-- 
Best regards,
Jacek Anaszewski