Re: [RFC v3 0/5] Add capacity capping support to the CPU controller

Rafael J. Wysocki
2017-03-15T11:41:54Z

On Tuesday, February 28, 2017 02:38:37 PM Patrick Bellasi wrote:
> Was: SchedTune: central, scheduler-driven, power-perfomance control
>
> This series presents a possible alternative design for what has been presented
> in the past as SchedTune. This redesign has been defined to address the main
> concerns and comments collected in the LKML discussion [1] as well at the last
> LPC [2].
> The aim of this posting is to present a working prototype which implements
> what has been discussed [2] with people like PeterZ, PaulT and TejunH.
>
> The main differences with respect to the previous proposal [1] are:
> 1. Task boosting/capping is now implemented as an extension on top of
> the existing CGroup CPU controller.
> 2. The previous boosting strategy, based on the inflation of the CPU's
> utilization, has been now replaced by a more simple yet effective set
> of capacity constraints.
>
> The proposed approach allows to constrain the minimum and maximum capacity
> of a CPU depending on the set of tasks currently RUNNABLE on that CPU.
> The set of active constraints are tracked by the core scheduler, thus they
> apply across all the scheduling classes. The value of the constraints are
> used to clamp the CPU utilization when the schedutil CPUFreq's governor
> selects a frequency for that CPU.
>
> This means that the new proposed approach allows to extend the concept of
> tasks classification to frequencies selection, thus allowing informed
> run-times (e.g. Android, ChromeOS, etc.) to efficiently implement different
> optimization policies such as:
> a) Boosting of important tasks, by enforcing a minimum capacity in the
> CPUs where they are enqueued for execution.
> b) Capping of background tasks, by enforcing a maximum capacity.
> c) Containment of OPPs for RT tasks which cannot easily be switched to
> the usage of the DL class, but still don't need to run at the maximum
> frequency.

Do you have any practical examples of that, like for example what exactly
Android is going to use this for?

I gather that there is some experience with the current EAS implementation
there, so I wonder how this work is related to that.

Thanks,
Rafael