Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] sched: cpufreq: Remove magic margins

Peter Zijlstra
2023-09-07T15:41:39Z

On Mon, Aug 28, 2023 at 12:31:56AM +0100, Qais Yousef wrote:

> Equally recent discussion in PELT HALFLIFE thread highlighted the need for
> a way to tune system response time to achieve better perf, power and thermal
> characteristic for a given system
>
> https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220829055450.1703092-1-dietmar.eggemann@arm.com/
>

> To further help tune the system, we introduce PELT HALFLIFE multiplier as
> a boot time parameter. This parameter has an impact on how fast we migrate, so
> should compensate for whoever needed to tune fits_capacity(); and it has great
> impact on default response_time_ms. Particularly it gives a natural faster rise
> time when the system gets busy, AND fall time when the system goes back to
> idle. It is coarse grain response control that can be coupled with finer grain
> control via schedutil's response_time_ms.

You're misrepresenting things... The outcome of that thread above was
that PELT halftime was not the primary problem. Specifically:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/424e2c81-987d-f10e-106d-8b4c611768bc@arm.com/

mentions that the only thing that gaming nonsense cares about is DVFS
ramp-up.

None of the other PELT users mattered one bit.

Also, ISTR a fair amount of this was workload dependent. So a solution
that has per-task configurability -- like UTIL_EST_FASTER, seems more
suitable.

I'm *really* hesitant on adding all these mostly random knobs -- esp.
without strong justification -- which you don't present. You mostly seem
to justify things with: people do random hack, we should legitimize them
hacks.

Like the last time around, I want the actual problem explained. The
problem is not that random people on the internet do random things to
their kernel.