Re: [PATCH 3/6] cpufreq: governor: Drop min_sampling_rate

From: Dominik Brodowski
Date: Thu Jun 29 2017 - 14:02:53 EST


On Thu, Jun 29, 2017 at 04:29:06PM +0530, Viresh Kumar wrote:
> The cpufreq core and governors aren't supposed to set a limit on how
> fast we want to try changing the frequency. This is currently done for
> the legacy governors with help of min_sampling_rate.
>
> At worst, we may end up setting the sampling rate to a value lower than
> the rate at which frequency can be changed and then one of the CPUs in
> the policy will be only changing frequency for ever.

Is it safe to issue requests to change the CPU frequency so frequently, even
on historic hardware such as speedstep-{ich,smi,centrino}? In the past,
these checks more or less disallowed the running of dynamic frequency
scaling at least on speedstep-smi[*], but maybe on a few other platforms as
well. That's why I am curious on whether this may break systems potentially
on a hardware level if the hardware was not designed to do dynamic frequency
scaling (and not just frequency switches on battery/AC).

Best,
Dominik