Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 18:13:36 +0100
From: Juri Lelli <juri.lelli@arm.com>
To: "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@rjwysocki.net>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>, mingo@redhat.com,
        viresh.kumar@linaro.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        linux-pm@vger.kernel.org, tglx@linutronix.de,
        vincent.guittot@linaro.org, rostedt@goodmis.org,
        luca.abeni@santannapisa.it, claudio@evidence.eu.com,
        tommaso.cucinotta@santannapisa.it, bristot@redhat.com,
        mathieu.poirier@linaro.org, tkjos@android.com, joelaf@google.com,
        andresoportus@google.com, morten.rasmussen@arm.com,
        dietmar.eggemann@arm.com, patrick.bellasi@arm.com,
        Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>,
        "Rafael J . Wysocki" <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>,
        Mark Brown <broonie@kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [RFD PATCH 3/5] sched/cpufreq_schedutil: make worker kthread be
 SCHED_DEADLINE
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On 27/03/17 19:05, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Monday, March 27, 2017 06:01:34 PM Juri Lelli wrote:
> > On 27/03/17 18:50, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 02:08:58PM +0000, Juri Lelli wrote:
> > > > Worker kthread needs to be able to change frequency for all other
> > > > threads.
> > > > 
> > > > Make it special, just under STOP class.
> > > 
> > > *yuck* ;-)
> > > 
> > 
> > Eh, I know. :/
> > 
> > > So imagine our I2C/SPI bus is 'busy' and its mutex taken, then this
> > > 'soecial' task will need to boost it. Now add BWI to your thinking and
> > > shudder.
> > > 
> > 
> > Currently that kthread is FIFO already, so boosting still applies. Not as
> > bad as in the BWI case though. More thinking required.
> > 
> > > 
> > > On IRC broonie mentioned that:
> > > 
> > >  - most PMIC operations are fire and forget (no need to wait for a
> > >    response).
> > >  - PMIC 'packets' are 'small'.
> > >  - SPI has the possibility to push stuff on the queue.
> > > 
> > > Taken together this seems to suggest we can rework cpufreq drivers to
> > > function in-context, either directly push the packet on the bus if
> > > available, or queue it and let whoever owns it sort it without blocking.
> > > 
> > > It might be possible to rework/augment I2C to also support pushing stuff
> > > on a queue.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > So if we can make all that work, we can do away with this horrible
> > > horrible kthread. Which is, IMO, a much better solution.
> > > 
> > > Thoughts?
> > 
> > Right. This is more a schedutil (cpufreq) problem though, IMHO. Even if
> > I agree that what you are proposing is way more clean (and here I
> > actually assume it's feasible at all), I fear it will take quite some
> > time to get reworked.
> 
> Why do you think so?
> 

It simply seemed a major rework to me. :)