Re: [RFC PATCH v1 1/1] leds: support to use own workqueue for each LED

[Dmitry Rokosov]

Hello Pavel,

Do you have any feedback/thoughts about this one?
The problem looks very bad, Load Average value should not grow up due to
any userspace triggered led animation. I suppose we stronlgy need to
fixup this behavior for sure.

Appreciate any help!

On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 05:47:04PM +0300, Dmitry Rokosov wrote:
> Hello Pavel and Arseniy,
> 
> Please find my thoughts below.
> 
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2022 at 10:01:28AM +0300, Arseniy Krasnov wrote:
> > On 30.10.2022 23:15, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > > Hi!
> > > 
> > >>>> This allows to set own workqueue for each LED. This may be useful, because
> > >>>> default 'system_wq' does not guarantee execution order of each work_struct,
> > >>>> thus for several brightness update requests (for multiple leds), real
> > >>>> brightness switch could be in random order.
> > >>>
> > >>> So.. what?
> > >>>
> > >>> Even if execution order is switched, human eye will not be able to
> > >>> tell the difference.
> > >> Hello,
> > >>
> > >> Problem arises on one of our boards where we have 14 triples of leds(each
> > >> triple contains R G B). Test case is to play complex animation on all leds:
> > >> smooth switch from on RGB state to another. Sometimes there are glitches in
> > >> this process - divergence from expectable RGB state. We fixed this by using
> > >> ordered workqueue.
> > > 
> > > Are there other solutions possible? Like batch and always apply _all_
> > > the updates you have queued from your the worker code?
> > 
> > IIUC You, it is possible to do this if brightness update requests are performed using
> > write to "brightness" file in /sys/class/led/. But if pattern trigger mode is used(in my
> > case) - I can't synchronize these requests as they are created internally in kernel on
> > timer tick.
> 
> Even more, system_wq is used when you push brightness changing requests
> to sysfs node, and it could be re-ordered as well. In other words, from
> queue perspective sysfs iface and trigger iface have the same behavior.
> 
> Also we can be faced with another big problem here: let's imagine you have
> I2C based LED controller driver. Usually, in such drivers you're stuck
> to the one driver owned mutex, which protects I2C transactions from each
> other.
> 
> When you change brightness very often (let's say a hundred thousand times
> per minute) you schedule many workers to system_wq. Due to system_wq is
> multicore and unordered it creates many kworkers. Each kworker stucks on
> the driver mutex and goes to TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE state. It affects Load
> Average value so much. On the our device LA maximum could reach 30-35
> units due to such idle kworkers.
> 
> I'm not sure custom workqueue initialization from specific HW driver is
> a good solution... But it's much better than nothing.
> 
> Pavel, please share your thoughts about above problems? Maybe you have
> more advanced and scalable solution idea, I would appreciate if you
> could share it with us.

-- 
Thank you,
Dmitry