Re: RFC: A proposal for power capping through forced idle in theLinux Kernel

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Tue Dec 22 2009 - 14:55:32 EST


On Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:48:24 +0100
Peter Zijlstra <peterz@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Mon, 2009-12-14 at 16:19 -0800, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
>
> > I like the general idea, I have one request (that I didn't see
> > quite in your explanation): Please make sure that all cpus in the
> > system do their idle injection at the same time, so that memory can
> > go into power saving mode as well during this time etc etc...
>
> And then you're going to ask that it scales too, right? :-)
>
> Gang-scheduling is inherently non scalable, be it for idle time or
> not.

well... there's many ways to do this... one option is to agree, ahead
of time, which jiffies values you're going to do the idle thing on.
Say every 100 jiffies where jiffies % 100 is 0....

then the scalability thing isn't a big deal.. and you still do it all
at the same time. Or at least "enough" at the same time for it to not
matter



--
Arjan van de Ven Intel Open Source Technology Centre
For development, discussion and tips for power savings,
visit http://www.lesswatts.org
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