The prediction for future is difficult and when the cpuidle governor prediction fails and govenor possibly choose the shallower C-state than it should. How to quickly notice and find the failure becomes important for power saving. cpuidle menu governor has a method to predict the repeat pattern if there are 8 C-states residency which are continuous and the same or very close, so it will predict the next C-states residency will keep same residency time. We encountered a real case that turbostat utility (tools/power/x86/turbostat) at kernel 3.3 or early. turbostat utility will read 10 registers one by one at Sandybridge, so it will generate 10 IPIs to wake up idle CPUs. So cpuidle menu governor will predict it is repeat mode and there is another IPI wake up idle CPU soon, so it keeps idle CPU stay at C1 state even though CPU is totally idle. However, in the turbostat, following 10 registers reading is sleep 5 seconds by default, so the idle CPU will keep at C1 for a long time though it is idle until break event occurs. The "old turbostat" is specific case and it is already fix by skip to read CPU MSRs. But we do not guarantee that other application will not do it like this. So the proper ways is to enhance the logic of the men governor prediction for next C-states. This patchset adds a timer when menu governor choose a non-deepest C-state in order to wake up quickly from shallow C-state to avoid staying too long at shallow C-state for prediction failure. If the timer is not triggered and CPU is waken up from C-state, the timer will be cancelled initiatively to avoid the adding timer bring affect to system. If the timer is time out, CPU will quickly be waken up from shallow C-state and re-evaluates deeper C-states possibility. After plenty of testing and tuning, the patchset get about 1% power efficiency ehancement in SpecPower2008 on Romley-EP. Especailly, when workload is not so high < 70%, it can notice 1~3 watts power saving; while workload is high > 80%, It will cost more power consumption. Another benchmarks non-CPU intensive, like fio, apache and aio-stress will also get power saving while the performance does not drop. While I try to fix the issue, I got a lot of help and suggestion from Arjan, Thanks a lot Arjan! Thanks -Youquan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-acpi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
