[RFC PATCH 2/8] Documentation: arm: define DT cpu capacity bindings

Juri Lelli
2015-12-15T15:46:51Z

On 15/12/15 15:32, Mark Rutland wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 03:08:13PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> > On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 02:01:36PM +0000, Mark Rutland wrote:
> >
> > > I really don't want to see a table of magic numbers in the kernel.
> >
> > Right, there's pitfalls there too although not being part of an ABI
> > does make them more manageable.
>
> I think that people are very likely to treat them exactly like an ABI,
> w.r.t. any regressions in performance that result from their addition,
> modification, or removal. That becomes really horrible when new CPUs
> appear.
>

Yeah, and I guess the path towards out of three patches changing this
values for a specifica platform (without exposing the same changes
upstream) is not too far away.

> > One thing it's probably helpful to establish here is how much the
> > specific numbers are going to matter in the grand scheme of things. If
> > the specific numbers *are* super important then nobody is going to want
> > to touch them as they'll be prone to getting tweaked. If instead the
> > numbers just need to be ballpark accurate so the scheduler starts off in
> > roughly the right place and the specific numbers don't matter it's a lot
> > easier and having a table in the kernel until we think of something
> > better (if that ever happens) gets a lot easier.
>
> I agree that we first need to figure out the importance of these
> numbers. I disagree that our first step should be to add a table.
>

My take is that ballpark is fine, but it's a per platform/configuration
ballpark that we need. Not a per core-type one.

> > My expectation is that we just need good enough, not perfect, and that
> > seems to match what Juri is saying about the expectation that most of
> > the fine tuning is done via other knobs.
>
> My expectation is that if a ballpark figure is good enough, it should be
> possible to implement something trivial like bogomips / loop_per_jiffy
> calculation.
>

I didn't really followed that, so I might be wrong here, but isn't
already happened a discussion about how we want/like to stop exposing
bogomips info or rely on it for anything but in kernel delay loops?

Thanks,

- Juri