Andi Kleen wrote:
Artem Bityutskiy <Artem.Bityutskiy@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
The patches attempt to optimize the periodic write-back and stop it when
there are no dirty data. IOW, we do not want the thread to wake up every
5 seconds (by default), find there is nothing to do, and so on.
Is waking up every 5 seconds really a problem?
Yes, it is. In OMAP3 we may switch the core and most of peripherals
to off and we may stay in off and consume really few power. And waking
up from off every 5 seconds for no good reason is bad.
The normal rule of thumb is iirc that longer sleep times than a few hundred
ms give dimishing returns in terms of power saving.
I think our pm guys measured this on OMAP3 and it translates to
~hour of idle mode. And yes, this is bad for devices which
run from battery.
A simple way might be simple to batch the timer better with other timers.
I agree. There is a lot of work in this direction. There are many
places where we could use range hrtimers or deferrable timers
and improve PM. But I consider this to be the second level of
optimization. The first level is to get rid of unneeded events
completely.
--
Best Regards,
Artem Bityutskiy (Артём Битюцкий)
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