[PATCHv3 0/4] Improve fallback LPJ calculation

From: Phil Carmody
Date: Thu Mar 10 2011 - 09:52:48 EST



Apologies for picking on you, Andrew, and sending this out of the blue,
but I didn't have much luck with my previous attempt, and I quite like
this patchset, so thought it was worth trying again.
(http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/9/28/121)

The guts of this patchset are in patch 2/4. The motivation for that patch
is that currently our OMAP calibrates itself using the trial-and-error
binary chop fallback that some other architectures no longer need to
perform. This is a lengthy process, taking 0.2s in an environment where
boot time is of great interest.

Patch 2/4 has two optimisations. Firstly, it replaces the initial repeated-
doubling to find the relevant power of 2 with a tight loop that just does
as much as it can in a jiffy. Secondly, it doesn't binary chop over an
entire power of 2 range, it choses a much smaller range based on how much
it squeezed in, and failed to squeeze in, during the first stage. Both
are significant optimisations, and bring our calibration down from 23
jiffies to 5, and, in the process, often arrive at a more accurate lpj
value.

The 'bands' and 'sub-logarithmic' growth may look over-engineered, but
they only cost a small level of inaccuracy in the initial guess (for all
architectures) in order to avoid the very large inaccuracies that appeared
during testing (on x86_64 architectures, and presumably others with less
metronomic operation). Note that due to the existence of the TSC and
other timers, the x86_64 will not typically use this fallback routine,
but I wanted to code defensively, able to cope with all kinds of processor
behaviours and kernel command line options.

Patch 3/4 is an additional trap for the nightmare scenario where the
initial estimate is very inaccurate, possibly due to things like SMIs.
It simply retries with a larger bound.

1/4 is simply cosmetic to prepare for 2/4.
4/4 is simply to assist testing and not intended for integration.


Changes since initial RFC:
- More informational commit messages
- Inserted patch 3/4 after discovering that x86_64 had a failure case.


Thanks for your time,
Phil
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