Re: [PATCH v3 0/2] Selftest for cpuidle latency measurement

[Pratik Sampat <psampat@linux.ibm.com>]

Hello Daniel,

On 21/07/20 8:27 pm, Daniel Lezcano wrote:
> On 21/07/2020 14:42, Pratik Rajesh Sampat wrote:
>> v2: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/7/17/369
>> Changelog v2-->v3
>> Based on comments from Gautham R. Shenoy adding the following in the
>> selftest,
>> 1. Grepping modules to determine if already loaded
>> 2. Wrapper to enable/disable states
>> 3. Preventing any operation/test on offlined CPUs
>> ---
>>
>> The patch series introduces a mechanism to measure wakeup latency for
>> IPI and timer based interrupts
>> The motivation behind this series is to find significant deviations
>> behind advertised latency and resisdency values
> Why do you want to measure for the timer and the IPI ? Whatever the
> source of the wakeup, the exit latency remains the same, no ?
>
> Is all this kernel-ish code really needed ?
>
> What about using a highres periodic timer and make it expires every eg.
> 50ms x 2400, so it is 120 secondes and measure the deviation. Repeat the
> operation for each idle states.
>
> And in order to make it as much accurate as possible, set the program
> affinity on a CPU and isolate this one by preventing other processes to
> be scheduled on and migrate the interrupts on the other CPUs.
>
> That will be all userspace code, no?
>
>
The kernel module may not needed now that you mention it.
IPI latencies could be measured using pipes and threads using
pthread_attr_setaffinity_np to control the experiment, as you
suggested. This should internally fire a smp_call_function_single.

The original idea was to essentially measure it as closely as possible
in the kernel without involving the kernel-->userspace overhead.
However, the user-space approach may not be too much of a problem as
we are collecting a baseline and the delta of the latency is what we
would be concerned about anyways!

With respect to measuring both timers and IPI latencies: In principle
yes, the exit latency should remain the same but if there is a
deviation in reality we may want to measure it.

I'll implement this experiment in the userspace and get back with the
numbers to confirm.

Thanks for your comments!
Best,
Pratik

>
>