Re: [RFC][PATCH v3 2/2] cpufreq: schedutil: Avoid reducing frequency of busy CPUs prematurely

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2017 at 12:08:50AM +0100, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> From: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
> 
> The way the schedutil governor uses the PELT metric causes it to
> underestimate the CPU utilization in some cases.
> 
> That can be easily demonstrated by running kernel compilation on
> a Sandy Bridge Intel processor, running turbostat in parallel with
> it and looking at the values written to the MSR_IA32_PERF_CTL
> register.  Namely, the expected result would be that when all CPUs
> were 100% busy, all of them would be requested to run in the maximum
> P-state, but observation shows that this clearly isn't the case.
> The CPUs run in the maximum P-state for a while and then are
> requested to run slower and go back to the maximum P-state after
> a while again.  That causes the actual frequency of the processor to
> visibly oscillate below the sustainable maximum in a jittery fashion
> which clearly is not desirable.
> 
> That has been attributed to CPU utilization metric updates on task
> migration that cause the total utilization value for the CPU to be
> reduced by the utilization of the migrated task.  If that happens,
> the schedutil governor may see a CPU utilization reduction and will
> attempt to reduce the CPU frequency accordingly right away.  That
> may be premature, though, for example if the system is generally
> busy and there are other runnable tasks waiting to be run on that
> CPU already.
> 
> This is unlikely to be an issue on systems where cpufreq policies are
> shared between multiple CPUs, because in those cases the policy
> utilization is computed as the maximum of the CPU utilization values
> over the whole policy and if that turns out to be low, reducing the
> frequency for the policy most likely is a good idea anyway.  On
> systems with one CPU per policy, however, it may affect performance
> adversely and even lead to increased energy consumption in some cases.
> 
> On those systems it may be addressed by taking another utilization
> metric into consideration, like whether or not the CPU whose
> frequency is about to be reduced has been idle recently, because if
> that's not the case, the CPU is likely to be busy in the near future
> and its frequency should not be reduced.
> 
> To that end, use the counter of idle calls in the timekeeping code.
> Namely, make the schedutil governor look at that counter for the
> current CPU every time before its frequency is about to be reduced.
> If the counter has not changed since the previous iteration of the
> governor computations for that CPU, the CPU has been busy for all
> that time and its frequency should not be decreased, so if the new
> frequency would be lower than the one set previously, the governor
> will skip the frequency update.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>

Right; this makes sense to me. Of course it would be good to have some
more measurements on this, but in principle:

Acked-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>