Re: [RFC/RFT] [PATCH 02/10] cpufreq: intel_pstate: Conditional frequency invariant accounting

Srinivas Pandruvada
2018-05-16T17:32:41Z

On Wed, 2018-05-16 at 11:07 +0200, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 9:29 AM, Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org
> > wrote:
> > On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 09:16:40AM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 15, 2018 at 09:49:03PM -0700, Srinivas Pandruvada
> > > wrote:
> > > > intel_pstate has two operating modes: active and passive. In
> > > > "active"
> > > > mode, the in-built scaling governor is used and in "passive"
> > > > mode,
> > > > the driver can be used with any governor like "schedutil". In
> > > > "active"
> > > > mode the utilization values from schedutil is not used and
> > > > there is
> > > > a requirement from high performance computing use cases, not to
> > > > read
> > > > any APERF/MPERF MSRs. In this case no need to use CPU cycles
> > > > for
> > > > frequency invariant accounting by reading APERF/MPERF MSRs.
> > > > With this change frequency invariant account is only enabled in
> > > > "passive" mode.
> > >
> > > WTH is active/passive? Is passive when we select performance
> > > governor?
> >
> > Bah, I cannot read it seems. active is when we use the intel_pstate
> > governor and passive is when we use schedutil and only use
> > intel_pstate
> > as a driver.
> >
> > > Also; you have to explain why using APERF/MPERF is bad in that
> > > case. Why
> > > do they care if we read those MSRs during the tick?
> >
> > That still stands.. this needs to be properly explained.
>
> I guess this is from the intel_pstate perspective only.
>
> The active mode is only used with HWP, so intel_pstate doesn't look
> at
> the utilization (in any form) in the passive mode today.
>
> Still, there are other reasons for PELT to be scale-invariant, so ...
Not sure about the use case in active mode other than dynamic HWP boost
later in this series. If any, I can remove this patch.