Re: [RFC PATCH v2 0/4] CPUs capacity information for heterogeneous systems

From: Mark Brown
Date: Fri Jan 15 2016 - 13:01:21 EST


On Fri, Jan 08, 2016 at 02:09:28PM +0000, Juri Lelli wrote:

> Second version of this RFC proposes an alternative solution (w.r.t. v1) to the
> problem of how do we init CPUs original capacity: we run a bogus benchmark (for
> this RFC I simple stole int_sqrt from lib/ and I run that in a loop to perform
> some integer computation, I'm sure there are better benchmarks around) on the
> first cpu of each frequency domain (assuming no u-arch differences inside
> domains), measure time to complete a fixed number of iterations and then
> normalize results to SCHED_CAPACITY_SCALE (1024). I didn't spend much time in
> polishing this up or thinking about a better benchmark, as this is an RFC and
> I'd like discussion happening before we make this solution better
> working/looking. However, surprisingly, results are not that bad already:

This approach looks good to me - certainly vastly preferable to putting
the numbers into DT.

> 2. Dynamic profiling at boot (v2)
>
> pros: - does not require a standardized definition of capacity
> - cannot be incorrectly tuned (once benchmark is fixed)
> - does not require user/integrator work

> cons: - not easy to come up with a clean solution, as it seems interaction
> with several subsystems (e.g., cpufreq) is required

This actually seems to be pretty clean.

> - not easy to agree upon a single benchmark (that has to be both
> representative and simple enough to run at boot)
> - numbers might (and do) vary from boot to boot

This does come back to the question of how accurate the numbers need to
be - is "good enough" fine?

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