Re: [PATCH] Add sysfs support for fbdefio delay

["Rick L. Vinyard, Jr." <rvinyard@cs.nmsu.edu>]

Jaya Kumar wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 11:36 PM, Rick L. Vinyard, Jr.
> <rvinyard@cs.nmsu.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Jaya Kumar wrote:
>>> On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Rick L. Vinyard, Jr.
>>> <rvinyard@cs.nmsu.edu> wrote:
>>>> Jaya Kumar wrote:
>>>
>>> Being concerned about CPU utilization is a good thing. But say for
>>> example, your USB ethernet driver or USB audio driver is taking a lot
>>> of cpu time packetizing traffic, then would I be correct that your
>>> desire is to expose an inter-packetization driver specific sleep time
>>> controllable by userspace via sysfs for all ethernet, audio, etc
>>> drivers? (by driver specific, I mean the sysfs parameter would be
>>> presented by all drivers but the value would be specific to each one,
>>> which is the way your current patch would behave for all fb drivers).
>>>
>>
>> I think the answer is yes, whether this were a fb, network, audio, etc.
>> If
>> there is a clearly defined parameter at which resource utilization can
>> be
>> adjusted in a standard way.
>
> Hi Rick,
>
> Sure, we can find these driver resource utilization choke points, and
> maybe even make it sort of standard, but that does not mean that we
> should expose all of this to userspace. Adding more userspace tunables
> for each driver in order to effect fb, network, audio bus utilization,
> is not appealing. So I think we disagree about the fundamentals.
>
> My conclusion is: I'm opposed this patch, because it exposes the defio
> delay parameter for _all_ fb drivers, _each_ through a
> /sys/class/graphics/fb_driver_name/defio_delay sysfs entry and also
> adds a min/max issue. The behaviour and system impact seen by
> userspace when changing the parameter is not standard across the
> typical range of systems and devices. More importantly, exposing each
> driver's defio delay to userspace is not a good way to address the 2
> underlying functional goals that were raised during this discussion:
> 1) being able to control a driver's bus/cpu utilization, and 2)
> allowing certain plugins/etc to be able to increase display update
> frequency for subregions of the display.
>
> Just to be verbose, please don't let my rejection of this specific
> patch affect your other patches as I see those as being very useful
> and close to being suitable for merging.
>

No problem. I understand the desire to be conservative.