Re: [PATCH RFC] tick/sched: Prevent pointless NOHZ transitions

[Thomas Gleixner <tglx@kernel.org>]

On Wed, Feb 25 2026 at 14:10, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2026 at 1:54 PM Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael@kernel.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > Which prevents VMs or other systems which do not have an idle driver to
>> > stop the tick at all. That's just obviously wrong, no?
>>
>> The benefit from stopping the tick in cpuidle is that it doesn't kick
>> CPUs from idle states unnecessarily, so more energy can be saved (or
>> even some energy can be saved at all if the idle state target
>> residency is large enough), but if the idle state in question is
>> shallow, that's rather not super-useful.  And I'd rather not expect
>> default idle to be a deep idle state because that would obviously hurt
>> low-latency use cases.

There are systems out there where even HLT (or the architecture specific
equivalent) saves power magically in the firmware.

>> I must be missing something, so what is it?
>
> OK, if I'm not mistaken, the tick in a VM will effectively become a
> periodic hrtimer in the host and it would prevent the host cpuidle
> from stopping the tick.  Fair enough.

That's the energy side.

The other problem is performance in the guest itself. If the guest idles
only briefly and can avoid the rearm of the timer on wakeup then it wins
performance wise. That's true for bare metal too, but the rearm on bare
metal is less expensive than a full VM exit.

Thanks,

        tglx