Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v1 00/11] Create fast idle path for short idle periods
To: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>, Andi Kleen <ak@linux.intel.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>,
        Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
        Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>, Aubrey Li <aubrey.li@intel.com>,
        len.brown@intel.com, rjw@rjwysocki.net, tim.c.chen@linux.intel.com,
        arjan@linux.intel.com, paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com,
        yang.zhang.wz@gmail.com, x86@kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        daniel.lezcano@linaro.org
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From: "Li, Aubrey" <aubrey.li@linux.intel.com>
Message-ID: <f0ca590c-ea67-c17a-b0b9-13940150f1ae@linux.intel.com>
Date: Tue, 18 Jul 2017 14:56:47 +0800
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On 2017/7/18 14:43, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Jul 2017, Andi Kleen wrote:
> 
>>> We need a tradeoff here IMHO. I'll check Daniel's work to understand how/if
>>> it's better than menu governor.
>>
>> I still would like to see how the fast path without the C1 heuristic works.
>>
>> Fast pathing is a different concept from a better predictor. IMHO we need
>> both, but the first is likely lower hanging fruit.
> 
> Hacking something on the side is always the lower hanging fruit as it
> avoids solving the hard problems. As Peter said already, that's not going
> to happen unless there is a real technical reason why the general path
> cannot be fixed. So far there is no proof for that.
> 
Let me try to make a summary, please correct me if I was wrong.

1) for quiet_vmstat, we are agreed to move to another place where tick is
really stopped.

2) for rcu idle enter/exit, I measured the details which Paul provided, and
the result matches with what I have measured before, nothing notable found.
But it still makes more sense if we can make rcu idle enter/exit hooked with
tick off. (it's possible other workloads behave differently)

3) for tick nohz idle, we want to skip if the coming idle is short. If we can
skip the tick nohz idle, we then skip all the items depending on it. But, there
are two hard points:

3.1) how to compute the period of the coming idle. My current proposal is to
use two factors in the current idle menu governor. There are two possible
options from Peter and Thomas, the one is to use scheduler idle estimate, which
is task activity based, the other is to use the statistics generated from irq
timings work.

3.2) how to determine if the idle is short or long. My current proposal is to
use a tunable value via /sys, while Peter prefers an auto-adjust mechanism. I
didn't get the details of an auto-adjust mechanism yet

4) for idle loop, my proposal introduces a simple one to use default idle
routine directly, while Peter and Thomas suggest we fix c-state selection
in the existing idle path.

Thanks,
-Aubrey