Re: PM regression with LED changes in next-20161109

From: Hans de Goede
Date: Sat Nov 12 2016 - 05:44:03 EST


Hi,

On 12-11-16 11:24, Jacek Anaszewski wrote:
Hi,

On 11/11/2016 08:28 PM, Hans de Goede wrote:
Hi,

On 11-11-16 18:03, Jacek Anaszewski wrote:
On 11/11/2016 01:01 PM, Pavel Machek wrote:
On Thu 2016-11-10 22:34:07, Jacek Anaszewski wrote:
Hi,

On 11/10/2016 09:29 PM, Pavel Machek wrote:
On Thu 2016-11-10 10:55:37, Tony Lindgren wrote:
* Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx> [161110 09:29]:
Hi!

Looks like commit 883d32ce3385 ("leds: core: Add support for
poll()ing
the sysfs brightness attr for changes.") breaks runtime PM
for me.

On my omap dm3730 based test system, idle power consumption
is over 70
times higher now with this patch! It goes from about 6mW for
the core
system to over 440mW during idle meaning there's some busy
timer now
active.

Reverting this patch fixes the issue. Any ideas?

Are you using any LED that toggles with high frequency? Like perhaps
LED that is lit when CPU is active?

Yeah one of them seems to have cpu0 as the default trigger.

Aha. Its quite obvious we don't want to notify sysfs each time that
one is toggled, right?

IMO brightness should display max brightness for the trigger, as Hans
suggested, anything else is madness for trigger such as cpu activity.

Are you suggesting that we should revert changes introduced
by below patch?

commit 29d76dfa29fe22583aefddccda0bc56aa81035dc
Author: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue Mar 18 09:47:48 2008 +0000

leds: Add support to leds with readable status

Some led hardware allows drivers to query the led state, and
this patch
adds a hook to let the led class take advantage of that
information when
available.

Without this functionality, when access to the led hardware is not
exclusive (i.e. firmware or hardware might change its state
behind the
kernel's back), reality goes out of sync with the led class'
idea of
what
the led is doing, which is annoying at best.

Hmm. So userland can read the LED state, and it can get _some_ value
back, but it can not know if it is current state or not.

I don't think that's a good interface. I see it is from 2008... is
someone using it? Maybe it is too late for revert.

I can imagine it being used in flash LED use case. E.g. one
could use oneshot trigger to trigger flash strobe, and then
he could periodically read brightness file to check, for whatever
reason, whether the flash is strobing.

But I'd certainly not extend it with poll.

We could add a dedicated file e.g. hw_brightness_change for that
(maybe someone will have a better candidate for the file name).

Why a dedicated file? Are we going to mirror brightness here
wrt r/w (show/store) behavior ? If not userspace now needs
2 open fds which is not really nice. If we are and we are
not going to use poll for something else on brightness itself
then why not just poll directly on brightness ?

My main concern is that reporting only hw brightness changes
wouldn't be consistent with general brightness file purpose.
One could expect that brightness changes made by triggers
should be also reported.

Ok, I agree that not notifying poll() while an actual
read() would result in a different value is not really good
semantics.

I don't like to call it hw_brightness_change though, as
mentioned before I believe that if we were to start with
a clean slate we would make the brightness file's read/write
behavior more a mirror of itself.

So I would like to propose creating a new read-write
user_brightness file.

The write behavior would be 100% identical to the brightness
file (in code terms it will call the same store function).

The the read behavior otoh will be different: it will shows
the last brightness as set by the user, this would show the
read behavior we really want of brightness: show the real
brightness when not blinking / triggers are active and show
the brightness used when on when blinking / triggers are active.

We could then add poll support on this new user_brightness
file, thus avoiding the problem with the extra cpu-load on
notifications on blinking / triggers.

I'd make it only readable, so it wouldn't mirror brightness
file behavior.

Then userspace which wants to be able to read + write + poll
the brightness again needs to open 2 fds, as suggested
above for the new user_brightness file it will be easy
to just make it mimic the brightness file write behavior
and then userspace only needs to open one fd.

Regards,

Hans





Its purpose would be clear: notify hw brightness changes
and provide the brightness value that was set by the hardware
last time. It implies that this value could be different from
the one the brightness file reports. E.g. hw could have changed
brightness, which could be later updated through brightness
file, but hw_brightness_change would still report brightness level
that was set by the hardware last time. It could be useful
e.g. in case of showing the difference between the desired
value and the currently allowed configuration (e.g. if the
firmware automatically adjusted the value set by the user).