Re: [PATCH 3/7] idle, thermal, acpi: Remove home grown idle implementations

Arjan van de Ven
2013-11-21T19:45:24Z

On 11/21/2013 11:19 AM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 08:21:03AM -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>> On 11/21/2013 8:07 AM, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
>>> As long as RCU has some reliable way to identify an idle task, I am
>>> good. But I have to ask -- why can't idle injection coordinate with
>>> the existing idle tasks rather than temporarily making alternative
>>> idle tasks?
>>
>> it's not a real idle. that's the whole problem of the situation.
>> to the rest of the OS, this is being BUSY (busy saving power using
>> a CPU instruction, but it might as well have been an mdelay() operation)
>> and it's also what end users expect; they want to be able to see
>> where there performance (read: cpu time in "top") is going.
>
> My concern is keeping RCU's books straight. Suppose that there is a need
> to call for idle in the middle of a preemptible RCU read-side critical
> section. Now, if that call for idle involves a context switch, all is
> well -- RCU will see the task as still being in its RCU read-side critical
> section, which means that it is OK for RCU to see the CPU as idle.
>
> However, if there is no context switch and RCU sees the CPU as idle,
> preemptible RCU could prematurely end the grace period. If there is no
> context switch and RCU sees the CPU as non-idle for too long, we start
> getting RCU CPU stall warning splats.
>
> Another approach would be to only inject idle when the CPU is not
> doing anything that could possibly be in an RCU read-side critical
> section. But things might get a bit hot in case of an overly
> long RCU read-side critical section.
>
> One approach that might work would be to hook into RCU's context-switch
> code going in and coming out, then telling RCU that the CPU is idle,
> even though top and friends see it as non-idle. This last is in fact
> similar to how RCU handles userspace execution for NO_HZ_FULL.
>

so powerclamp and such are not "idle".
They are "busy" from everything except the lowest level of the CPU hardware.
once you start thinking of them as idle, all hell breaks lose in terms of implications
(including sysadmin visibility etc).... (hence some of the explosions in this thread
as well).

but it's not "idle".

it's "put the cpu in a low power state for a specified amount of time". sure it uses the same
instruction to do so that the idle loop uses.

(now to make it messy, the current driver does a bunch of things similar to the idle loop
which is a mess and fair to be complained about)