Hi Hugh,
Typically, on our setup we observed, 10% less power consumption with some
use-cases in which CPU goes to power collapse frequently. For example,
playing audio while typically CPU remains idle.
I'm probably stupid, but I don't quite get your scenario from that
description: please would you spell it out a little more clearly for me?
I think I have missed to share some important details here. Scenario
here in general is where CPUs stay in Low Power mode and waits for
interrupt for long time. One such situation could be what we observed in
our testing. In our SoC based platform, Audio decode happens on a
separate HW block but during that, use-case demands CPUs to stay in Low
Power mode (not completely shut down) if not busy. Classic end-user
scenario is Audio playback while user does nothing else on the
mobile/watch. At this time, KSM wakes up the CPU at very regular
interval and affects the power consumption. Another scenario could be
background email sync where also for very long duration, CPU stays in
Low Power mode, not busy, not off-line.
Are you thinking of two CPUs, one of them running a process busily
streaming audio (with no VM_MERGEABLE areas to work on), most other
processes sleeping, and ksmd "pinned" to another, otherwise idle CPU?
I'm very inexperienced in scheduler (and audio) matters, but I'd like
to think that the scheduler would migrate ksmd to the mostly busy CPU
in that case - or is it actually 100% busy, with no room for ksmd too?
IMHO waking up the CPU considering busyness of active CPU is probably
not scheduler's interest (I am completely naive here so please correct
me if I am wrong). So, here I believe that ksmd will get scheduled on
active CPU where its timer will expire and not deferred.
To enable deferrable timers,
$ echo 1> /sys/kernel/mm/ksm/deferrable_timer
I do share Andrew's original reservations: I'd much prefer this if we
can just go ahead and do the deferrable timer without a new tunable
to concern the user, simple though your "deferrable_timer" knob is.
In an earlier mail, you said "We have observed that KSM does maximum
savings when system is idle", as reason why some will prefer a non-
deferrable timer. I am somewhat suspicious of that observation:
because KSM waits for a page's checksum to stabilize before it saves
it in its "unstable" tree of pages to compare against. So when the
rest of the system goes idle, KSM is briefly more likely to find
matches; but that may be a short-lived "success" once the system
becomes active again. So, I'm wondering if your observation just
reflects the mechanics of KSM, and is not actually a reason to
refrain from using a deferrable timer for everyone.
Sometimes savings in idle time are not always short-lived. For example,
in 512 MB DDR system running android saturates at somewhat around 25 MB
of KSM savings. We have observed this saturation achieved quicker when
phone is in idle. But I think that doesn't disprove your comment above.
So, I would keep deferrable timer as a default. Next patch.
On the other hand, I have a worry about using deferrable timer here.
I think I understand the value of a deferrable timer, in doing a job
which is bound to a particular cpu (mm/slab.c's cache_reap() gives
me a good example of that). But ksmd is potentially serving every
process, every cpu: we would not want it to be deferred indefinitely,
if other cpus (running processes with VM_MERGEABLE vmas) are active.
I too consider this as undesirable situation. But I think scheduler
won't schedule ksmd on a non-busy idle CPU if we have active CPUs.
Perhaps the likelihood of that scenario is too low; or perhaps it's
a reason why we do need to offer your "deferrable_timer" knob.
I didn't thought of this reason for having the knob but I would still
prefer to have a knob for some futuristic use-cases. Such as,
(1) When power is not constraint (charging mobile ?), we don't want KSM
to use deferrable timers.
(2) We want maximum savings from KSM at the cost of power to get more
free memory, even if it is short-lived.
May be above use-cases are not realistic. But providing a knob just
enables us to implement some logic in userspace. So, what do you think
of keeping the knob but default value is '1' i.e. use deferrable timers ?
Please, I need to understand better before acking this change.
By the way: perhaps KSM is the right place to start, but please take
a look also at THP in mm/huge_memory.c, whose khugepaged was originally
modelled on ksmd (but now seems to be using wait_event_freezable_timeout
rather than schedule_timeout_interruptible - I've not yet researched the
history behind that difference). I expect it to need the same treatment.
I have no idea of THP so far. But would check it in this perspective.
Thanks for the guide.
+ unsigned long enable;
+ int err;
+
+ err = kstrtoul(buf, 10,&enable);
+ if (err< 0)
+ return err;
+ if (enable>= 1)
+ return -EINVAL;
I haven't studied the patch itself, I'm still worrying about the concept.
But this caught my eye just before hitting Send: I don't think we need
a tunable which only accepts the value 0 ;)
Okay. I can correct this to accept any non-zero value. Is that okay ?
+ use_deferrable_timer = enable;
--
Chintan Pandya
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