Donate to e Foundation | Murena handsets with /e/OS | Own a part of Murena! Learn more

Skip to content
Commit 6b8fcd90 authored by Arjan van de Ven's avatar Arjan van de Ven Committed by Ingo Molnar
Browse files

ondemand: Solve a big performance issue by counting IOWAIT time as busy



The ondemand cpufreq governor uses CPU busy time (e.g. not-idle
time) as a measure for scaling the CPU frequency up or down.
If the CPU is busy, the CPU frequency scales up, if it's idle,
the CPU frequency scales down. Effectively, it uses the CPU busy
time as proxy variable for the more nebulous "how critical is
performance right now" question.

This algorithm falls flat on its face in the light of workloads
where you're alternatingly disk and CPU bound, such as the ever
popular "git grep", but also things like startup of programs and
maildir using email clients... much to the chagarin of Andrew
Morton.

This patch changes the ondemand algorithm to count iowait time
as busy, not idle, time. As shown in the breakdown cases above,
iowait is performance critical often, and by counting iowait,
the proxy variable becomes a more accurate representation of the
"how critical is performance" question.

The problem and fix are both verified with the "perf timechar"
tool.

Signed-off-by: default avatarArjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarDave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: default avatarRik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
LKML-Reference: <20100509082606.3d9f00d0@infradead.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
parent 0224cf4c
Loading
Loading
Loading
Loading
0% Loading or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment