Re: [patch v7 0/21] sched: power aware scheduling

[Len Brown <lenb@kernel.org>]

On 04/12/2013 12:48 PM, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Fri, 2013-04-12 at 18:23 +0200, Borislav Petkov wrote: 
>> On Fri, Apr 12, 2013 at 04:46:50PM +0800, Alex Shi wrote:
>>> Thanks a lot for comments, Len!
>>
>> AFAICT, you kinda forgot to answer his most important question:
>>
>>> These numbers suggest that this patch series simultaneously
>>> has a negative impact on performance and energy required
>>> to retire the workload.  Why do it?
> 
> Hm.  When I tested AIM7 compute on a NUMA box, there was a marked
> throughput increase at the low to moderate load end of the test spectrum
> IIRC.  Fully repeatable.  There were also other benefits unrelated to
> power, ie mitigation of the evil face of select_idle_sibling().  I
> rather liked what I saw during ~big box test-drive.
> 
> (just saying there are other aspects besides joules in there)

Mike,

Can you re-run your AIM7 measurement with turbo-mode and HT-mode disabled,
and then independently re-enable them?

If you still see the performance benefit, then that proves
that the scheduler hacks are not about tricking into
turbo mode, but something else.

If the performance gains *are* about interactions with turbo-mode,
then perhaps what we should really be doing here is making
the scheduler explicitly turbo-aware?  Of course, that begs the question
of how the scheduler should be aware of cpufreq in general...

thanks,
Len Brown, Intel Open Source Technology Center