Re: high power consumption in recent kernels

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 15:23 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-07-08 at 21:46 +0900, Norbert Preining wrote:
> > Looks promising, reverting the old patch, adding that one, building,
> > running, unplugging ppower, powertop runs now since some time,
> > it seems that we are back to better situation: 
> 
> Hrmm, Mike seems you wrecked power usage.. 
> 
> So nohz_ratelimit() prevents us from entering NOHZ when the last attempt
> was less than 1/2 a jiffy ago (fwiw: NSEC_PER_SEC/HZ == TICK_NSEC).
> 
> Its either entering idle or irq_exit trying to enter nohz state, if we
> keep skipping it it means that we get enough interrupt activity to
> render nohz useless anyway.. so not quite sure how this wrecks things..

OK, so Arjan said the gain could come from tricking the idle governor
into not using deeper C states. He also said he significantly cured said
governor in .35.

Mike could you re-run your netperf tests that showed the 10% throughput
gain? Hopefully the fixed governor will yield the same result and we can
kill off this ratelimit thing.