The venerable menu governor does some things that are quite
questionable in my view.
First, it includes timer wakeups in the pattern detection data and
mixes them up with wakeups from other sources which in some cases
causes it to expect what essentially would be a timer wakeup in a
time frame in which no timer wakeups are possible (because it knows
the time until the next timer event and that is later than the
expected wakeup time).
Second, it uses the extra exit latency limit based on the predicted
idle duration and depending on the number of tasks waiting on I/O,
even though those tasks may run on a different CPU when they are
woken up. Moreover, the time ranges used by it for the sleep length
correction factors depend on whether or not there are tasks waiting
on I/O, which again doesn't imply anything in particular, and they
are not correlated to the list of available idle states in any way
whatever.
Also, the pattern detection code in menu may end up considering
values that are too large to matter at all, in which cases running
it is a waste of time.
A major rework of the menu governor would be required to address
these issues and the performance of at least some workloads (tuned
specifically to the current behavior of the menu governor) is likely
to suffer from that. It is thus better to introduce an entirely new
governor without them and let everybody use the governor that works
better with their actual workloads.
The new governor introduced here, the timer events oriented (TEO)
governor, uses the same basic strategy as menu: it always tries to
find the deepest idle state that can be used in the given conditions.
However, it applies a different approach to that problem.
First, it doesn't use "correction factors" for the time till the
closest timer, but instead it tries to correlate the measured idle
duration values with the available idle states and use that
information to pick up the idle state that is most likely to "match"
the upcoming CPU idle interval.
Second, it doesn't take the number of "I/O waiters" into account at
all and the pattern detection code in it avoids taking timer wakeups
into account. It also only uses idle duration values less than the
current time till the closest timer (with the tick excluded) for that
purpose.
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Acked-by: Daniel Lezcano <daniel.lezcano@linaro.org>
Rafael J. Wysocki