Re: [PATCH 0/3] coupled cpuidle state support

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On 12/21/2011 01:09 AM, Colin Cross wrote:
On some ARM SMP SoCs (OMAP4460, Tegra 2, and probably more), the
cpus cannot be independently powered down, either due to
sequencing restrictions (on Tegra 2, cpu 0 must be the last to
power down), or due to HW bugs (on OMAP4460, a cpu powering up
will corrupt the gic state unless the other cpu runs a work
around).  Each cpu has a power state that it can enter without
coordinating with the other cpu (usually Wait For Interrupt, or
WFI), and one or more "coupled" power states that affect blocks
shared between the cpus (L2 cache, interrupt controller, and
sometimes the whole SoC).  Entering a coupled power state must
be tightly controlled on both cpus.

The easiest solution to implementing coupled cpu power states is
to hotplug all but one cpu whenever possible, usually using a
cpufreq governor that looks at cpu load to determine when to
enable the secondary cpus.  This causes problems, as hotplug is an
expensive operation, so the number of hotplug transitions must be
minimized, leading to very slow response to loads, often on the
order of seconds.

This patch series implements an alternative solution, where each
cpu will wait in the WFI state until all cpus are ready to enter
a coupled state, at which point the coupled state function will
be called on all cpus at approximately the same time.

Once all cpus are ready to enter idle, they are woken by an smp
cross call.  At this point, there is a chance that one of the
cpus will find work to do, and choose not to enter suspend.  A
final pass is needed to guarantee that all cpus will call the
power state enter function at the same time.  During this pass,
each cpu will increment the ready counter, and continue once the
ready counter matches the number of online coupled cpus.  If any
cpu exits idle, the other cpus will decrement their counter and
retry.

To use coupled cpuidle states, a cpuidle driver must:

    Set struct cpuidle_device.coupled_cpus to the mask of all
    coupled cpus, usually the same as cpu_possible_mask if all cpus
    are part of the same cluster.  The coupled_cpus mask must be
    set in the struct cpuidle_device for each cpu.

    Set struct cpuidle_device.safe_state to a state that is not a
    coupled state.  This is usually WFI.

    Set CPUIDLE_FLAG_COUPLED in struct cpuidle_state.flags for each
    state that affects multiple cpus.

    Provide a struct cpuidle_state.enter function for each state
    that affects multiple cpus.  This function is guaranteed to be
    called on all cpus at approximately the same time.  The driver
    should ensure that the cpus all abort together if any cpu tries
    to abort once the function is called.

This series was functionally tested on v3.0, but has only been
compile-tested on v3.2 after the removal of per-cpu state fields.

Hi Colin,

this patchset could be interesting to resolve in a generic way the cpu dependencies.
What is the status of this patchset ?

Did you have the opportunity to measure the power consumption with and without this patchset ?

Thanks
-- Daniel

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