Re: [RFC v3 5/5] sched/{core,cpufreq_schedutil}: add capacity clamping for RT/DL tasks

Patrick Bellasi
2017-03-15T11:40:52Z

On 13-Mar 03:08, Joel Fernandes (Google) wrote:
> Hi Patrick,
>
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2017 at 6:38 AM, Patrick Bellasi
> <patrick.bellasi@arm.com> wrote:
> > Currently schedutil enforce a maximum OPP when RT/DL tasks are RUNNABLE.
> > Such a mandatory policy can be made more tunable from userspace thus
> > allowing for example to define a reasonable max capacity (i.e.
> > frequency) which is required for the execution of a specific RT/DL
> > workload. This will contribute to make the RT class more "friendly" for
> > power/energy sensible applications.
> >
> > This patch extends the usage of capacity_{min,max} to the RT/DL classes.
> > Whenever a task in these classes is RUNNABLE, the capacity required is
> > defined by the constraints of the control group that task belongs to.
> >
>
> We briefly discussed this at Linaro Connect that this works well for
> sporadic RT tasks that run briefly and then sleep for long periods of
> time - so certainly this patch is good, but its only a partial
> solution to the problem of frequent and short-sleepers and something
> is required to keep the boost active for short non-RUNNABLE as well.
> The behavior with many periodic RT tasks is that they will sleep for
> short intervals and run for short intervals periodically. In this case
> removing the clamp (or the boost as in schedtune v2) on a dequeue will
> essentially mean during a narrow window cpufreq can drop the frequency
> and only to make it go back up again.
>
> Currently for schedtune v2, I am working on prototyping something like
> the following for Android:
> - if RT task is enqueue, introduce the boost.
> - When task is dequeued, start a timer for a "minimum deboost delay
> time" before taking out the boost.
> - If task is enqueued again before the timer fires, then cancel the timer.
>
> I don't think any "fix" to this particular issue should be to the
> schedutil governor and should be sorted before going to cpufreq itself
> (that is before making the request). What do you think about this?

My short observations are:

1) for certain RT tasks, which have a quite "predictable" activation
pattern, we should definitively try to use DEADLINE... which will
factor out all "boosting potential races" since the bandwidth
requirements are well defined at task description time.

2) CPU boosting is, at least for the time being, a best-effort feature
which is introduced mainly for FAIR tasks.

3) Tracking the boost at enqueue/dequeue time matches with the design
to track features/properties of the currently RUNNABLE tasks, while
avoiding to add yet another signal to track CPUs utilization.

4) Previous point is about "separation of concerns", thus IMHO any
policy defining how to consume the CPU utilization signal
(whether it is boosted or not) should be responsibility of
schedutil, which eventually does not exclude useful input from the
scheduler.

5) I understand the usefulness of a scale down threshold for schedutil
to reduce the current OPP, while I don't get the point for a scale
up threshold. If the system is demanding more capacity and there
are not HW constrains (e.g. pending changes) then we should go up
as soon as possible.

Finally, I think we can improve quite a lot the boosting issues you
are having with RT tasks by better refining the schedutil thresholds
implementation.

We already have some patches pending for review:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/3/2/385
which fixes some schedutil issue and we will follow up with others
trying to improve the rate-limiting to not compromise responsiveness.

> Thanks,
> Joel

Cheers Patrick

--
#include <best/regards.h>

Patrick Bellasi