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authorSrivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>2014-06-08 00:41:43 +0400
committerRafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>2014-06-08 00:53:51 +0400
commit18b46abd0009516c1973a57ccf4d01b9eaa3422a (patch)
treeafc3bb613633ed9cd4cd2f8efcab1f933cbbedb4 /drivers/cpufreq/integrator-cpufreq.c
parent906fe033145aab7d65a428bfda2cf19c75720894 (diff)
downloadlinux-18b46abd0009516c1973a57ccf4d01b9eaa3422a.tar.xz
cpufreq: governor: Be friendly towards latency-sensitive bursty workloads
Cpufreq governors like the ondemand governor calculate the load on the CPU periodically by employing deferrable timers. A deferrable timer won't fire if the CPU is completely idle (and there are no other timers to be run), in order to avoid unnecessary wakeups and thus save CPU power. However, the load calculation logic is agnostic to all this, and this can lead to the problem described below. Time (ms) CPU 1 100 Task-A running 110 Governor's timer fires, finds load as 100% in the last 10ms interval and increases the CPU frequency. 110.5 Task-A running 120 Governor's timer fires, finds load as 100% in the last 10ms interval and increases the CPU frequency. 125 Task-A went to sleep. With nothing else to do, CPU 1 went completely idle. 200 Task-A woke up and started running again. 200.5 Governor's deferred timer (which was originally programmed to fire at time 130) fires now. It calculates load for the time period 120 to 200.5, and finds the load is almost zero. Hence it decreases the CPU frequency to the minimum. 210 Governor's timer fires, finds load as 100% in the last 10ms interval and increases the CPU frequency. So, after the workload woke up and started running, the frequency was suddenly dropped to absolute minimum, and after that, there was an unnecessary delay of 10ms (sampling period) to increase the CPU frequency back to a reasonable value. And this pattern repeats for every wake-up-from-cpu-idle for that workload. This can be quite undesirable for latency- or response-time sensitive bursty workloads. So we need to fix the governor's logic to detect such wake-up-from- cpu-idle scenarios and start the workload at a reasonably high CPU frequency. One extreme solution would be to fake a load of 100% in such scenarios. But that might lead to undesirable side-effects such as frequency spikes (which might also need voltage changes) especially if the previous frequency happened to be very low. We just want to avoid the stupidity of dropping down the frequency to a minimum and then enduring a needless (and long) delay before ramping it up back again. So, let us simply carry forward the previous load - that is, let us just pretend that the 'load' for the current time-window is the same as the load for the previous window. That way, the frequency and voltage will continue to be set to whatever values they were set at previously. This means that bursty workloads will get a chance to influence the CPU frequency at which they wake up from cpu-idle, based on their past execution history. Thus, they might be able to avoid suffering from slow wakeups and long response-times. However, we should take care not to over-do this. For example, such a "copy previous load" logic will benefit cases like this: (where # represents busy and . represents idle) ##########.........#########.........###########...........##########........ but it will be detrimental in cases like the one shown below, because it will retain the high frequency (copied from the previous interval) even in a mostly idle system: ##########.........#.................#.....................#............... (i.e., the workload finished and the remaining tasks are such that their busy periods are smaller than the sampling interval, which causes the timer to always get deferred. So, this will make the copy-previous-load logic copy the initial high load to subsequent idle periods over and over again, thus keeping the frequency high unnecessarily). So, we modify this copy-previous-load logic such that it is used only once upon every wakeup-from-idle. Thus if we have 2 consecutive idle periods, the previous load won't get blindly copied over; cpufreq will freshly evaluate the load in the second idle interval, thus ensuring that the system comes back to its normal state. [ The right way to solve this whole problem is to teach the CPU frequency governors to also track load on a per-task basis, not just a per-CPU basis, and then use both the data sources intelligently to set the appropriate frequency on the CPUs. But that involves redesigning the cpufreq subsystem, so this patch should make the situation bearable until then. ] Experimental results: +-------------------+ I ran a modified version of ebizzy (called 'sleeping-ebizzy') that sleeps in between its execution such that its total utilization can be a user-defined value, say 10% or 20% (higher the utilization specified, lesser the amount of sleeps injected). This ebizzy was run with a single-thread, tied to CPU 8. Behavior observed with tracing (sample taken from 40% utilization runs): ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Without patch: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ kworker/8:2-12137 416.335742: cpu_frequency: state=2061000 cpu_id=8 kworker/8:2-12137 416.335744: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40753 416.345741: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 kworker/8:2-12137 416.345744: cpu_frequency: state=4123000 cpu_id=8 kworker/8:2-12137 416.345746: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40753 416.355738: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 <snip> --------------------------------------------------------------------- <snip> <...>-40753 416.402202: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=swapper/8 <idle>-0 416.502130: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/8 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40753 416.505738: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 kworker/8:2-12137 416.505739: cpu_frequency: state=2061000 cpu_id=8 kworker/8:2-12137 416.505741: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40753 416.515739: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 kworker/8:2-12137 416.515742: cpu_frequency: state=4123000 cpu_id=8 kworker/8:2-12137 416.515744: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy Observation: Ebizzy went idle at 416.402202, and started running again at 416.502130. But cpufreq noticed the long idle period, and dropped the frequency at 416.505739, only to increase it back again at 416.515742, realizing that the workload is in-fact CPU bound. Thus ebizzy needlessly ran at the lowest frequency for almost 13 milliseconds (almost 1 full sample period), and this pattern repeats on every sleep-wakeup. This could hurt latency-sensitive workloads quite a lot. With patch: ~~~~~~~~~~~ kworker/8:2-29802 464.832535: cpu_frequency: state=2061000 cpu_id=8 <snip> --------------------------------------------------------------------- <snip> kworker/8:2-29802 464.962538: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40738 464.972533: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 kworker/8:2-29802 464.972536: cpu_frequency: state=4123000 cpu_id=8 kworker/8:2-29802 464.972538: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40738 464.982531: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 <snip> --------------------------------------------------------------------- <snip> kworker/8:2-29802 465.022533: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40738 465.032531: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 kworker/8:2-29802 465.032532: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40738 465.035797: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=swapper/8 <idle>-0 465.240178: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/8 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40738 465.242533: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 kworker/8:2-29802 465.242535: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy <...>-40738 465.252531: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2 Observation: Ebizzy went idle at 465.035797, and started running again at 465.240178. Since ebizzy was the only real workload running on this CPU, cpufreq retained the frequency at 4.1Ghz throughout the run of ebizzy, no matter how many times ebizzy slept and woke-up in-between. Thus, ebizzy got the 10ms worth of 4.1 Ghz benefit during every sleep-wakeup (as compared to the run without the patch) and this boost gave a modest improvement in total throughput, as shown below. Sleeping-ebizzy records-per-second: ----------------------------------- Utilization Without patch With patch Difference (Absolute and % values) 10% 274767 277046 + 2279 (+0.829%) 20% 543429 553484 + 10055 (+1.850%) 40% 1090744 1107959 + 17215 (+1.578%) 60% 1634908 1662018 + 27110 (+1.658%) A rudimentary and somewhat approximately latency-sensitive workload such as sleeping-ebizzy itself showed a consistent, noticeable performance improvement with this patch. Hence, workloads that are truly latency-sensitive will benefit quite a bit from this change. Moreover, this is an overall win-win since this patch does not hurt power-savings at all (because, this patch does not reduce the idle time or idle residency; and the high frequency of the CPU when it goes to cpu-idle does not affect/hurt the power-savings of deep idle states). Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Reviewed-by: Gautham R. Shenoy <ego@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Acked-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'drivers/cpufreq/integrator-cpufreq.c')
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