Re: [BUG] schedutil governor produces regular max freq spikes because of lockup detector watchdog threads

Rafael J. Wysocki
2018-01-08T13:12:09Z

On Monday, January 8, 2018 5:01:21 AM CET Viresh Kumar wrote:
> On 05-01-18, 23:18, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Fri, Jan 5, 2018 at 9:37 PM, Leonard Crestez <leonard.crestez@nxp.com> wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > When using the schedutil governor together with the softlockup detector
> > > all CPUs go to their maximum frequency on a regular basis. This seems
> > > to be because the watchdog creates a RT thread on each CPU and this
> > > causes regular kicks with:
> > >
> > > cpufreq_update_this_cpu(rq, SCHED_CPUFREQ_RT);
> > >
> > > The schedutil governor responds to this by immediately setting the
> > > maximum cpu frequency, this is very undesirable.
> > >
> > > The issue can be fixed by this patch from android:
> > > https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9301909/
> > >
> > > The patch stalled in a long discussion about how it's difficult for
> > > cpufreq to deal with RT and how some RT users might just disable
> > > cpufreq. It is indeed hard but if the system experiences regular power
> > > kicks from a common debug feature they will end up disabling schedutil
> > > instead.
> >
> > They are basically free to use the other governors instead if they prefer them.
> >
> > > No other governors behave this way,
> >
> > Because they work differently overall.
> >
> > > perhaps the current behavior should be considered a bug in schedutil.
> > >
> > > That patch now has conflicts with latest upstream. Perhaps a modified
> > > variant should be reconsidered for inclusion, or is there some other
> > > solution pending?
> >
> > Patrick has a series of patches dealing with this problem area AFAICS,
> > but we are currently integrating material from Juri related to
> > deadline tasks.
>
> I am not sure if Patrick's patches would solve this problem at all as
> we still go to max for RT and the RT task is created from the
> softlockup detector somehow.
>
> One way to fix that can be to use DL for the softlockup detector as
> after Juri's patches we don't always go to max for DL.
>
> On the other side, AFAIR, Peter was very clear during the previous LPC
> that it doesn't make sense to use rt-avg as the above patch suggests.

Right.

Why does the softlockup watchdog use RT tasks in the first place?

Thanks,
Rafael