Re: [RFC] Should we add Android's Interactive governor into mainline now?

[Steve Muckle <steve.muckle@linaro.org>]

On Fri, May 13, 2016 at 08:51:56AM +0530, Viresh Kumar wrote:
> On 12-05-16, 14:10, Steve Muckle wrote:
> > By far the biggest user of interactive is Android (I'm not aware of its
> > use elsewhere). Persuading Google to switch is relatively doable once a
> > viable alternative exists. After that point I'd expect the desire to
> > merge and maintain interactive would almost immediately disappear. Folks
> > wanting to run upstream kernels on already released devices have much
> > bigger hurdles than merging the interactive governor.
> > 
> > But if interactive is merged I'm worried that many other users on random
> > platforms will adopt it, for whatever reason, introducing a support
> > burden during a time that we're trying to develop and encourage an
> > alternative.
> 
> Lets assume that its going to take enough time for (specially) Android to start
> using the schedutil governor. That's how it works.

Perhaps I'm more optimistic about schedutil's swift adoption by Google
once it's reached feature parity with interactive.

> So, if we are worried about new users using it (who may not have a good reason
> to do that but did it by mistake), maybe we can make the interactive governor
> depend on CONFIG_ARM.

Is there precedent for putting in artificial dependencies (i.e. ones
with no real runtime technical justification) for this kind of purpose,
i.e. to limit who starts using a merged feature? It seems a bit messy to me.