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Date:   Fri, 13 Apr 2018 10:11:36 +0100
From:   Morten Rasmussen <morten.rasmussen@arm.com>
To:     Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc:     Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org>,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>,
        Will Deacon <will.deacon@arm.com>,
        linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Dietmar Eggemann <dietmar.eggemann@arm.com>,
        Chris Redpath <chris.redpath@arm.com>,
        Valentin Schneider <valentin.schneider@arm.com>,
        LAK <linux-arm-kernel@lists.infradead.org>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] sched: support dynamiQ cluster
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On Thu, Apr 12, 2018 at 08:22:11PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 02:19:50PM +0100, Morten Rasmussen wrote:
> > As said above, I see your point about completion time might suffer in
> > some cases for low utilization tasks, but I don't see how you can fix
> > that automagically. ASYM_PACKING has a lot of problematic side-effects.
> > If use-space knows that completion time is important for a task, there
> > are already ways to improve that somewhat in mainline (task priority and
> > pinning), and more powerful solutions in the Android kernel which
> > Patrick is currently pushing upstream.
> 
> So I tend to side with Morten on this one. I don't particularly like
> ASYM_PACKING much, but we already had it for PPC and it works for the
> small difference in performance ITMI has.
> 
> At the time Morten already objected to using it for ITMI, and I just
> haven't had time to look into his proposal for using capacity.
> 
> But I don't see it working right for big.litte/dynamiq, simply because
> it is a very strong always big preference, which is against the whole
> design premisis of big.little (as Morten has been trying to argue).

In Vincent's defence, vendors do sometimes make design decisions that I
don't quite understand. So there could be users that really want a
non-energy-aware big-first policy, but as I said earlier in this thread,
that could be implemented better with a small tweak to wake_cap() and
using the misfit patches.

We would have to disable big-first policy and go with the current
migrate-big-task-to-big-cpus policy as soon as we care about energy. I'm
happy to give that try and come up with a patch.