Linux 3.4.95
Linux 3.4.96
cpufreq: governor: Be friendly towards latency-sensitive bursty workloads
Cpufreq governors like the ondemand governor calculate the load on the CPU
periodically by employing deferrable timers. A deferrable timer won't fire
if the CPU is completely idle (and there are no other timers to be run), in
order to avoid unnecessary wakeups and thus save CPU power.

However, the load calculation logic is agnostic to all this, and this can
lead to the problem described below.

Time (ms)               CPU 1

100                Task-A running

110                Governor's timer fires, finds load as 100% in the last
                   10ms interval and increases the CPU frequency.

110.5              Task-A running

120		   Governor's timer fires, finds load as 100% in the last
		   10ms interval and increases the CPU frequency.

125		   Task-A went to sleep. With nothing else to do, CPU 1
		   went completely idle.

200		   Task-A woke up and started running again.

200.5		   Governor's deferred timer (which was originally programmed
		   to fire at time 130) fires now. It calculates load for the
		   time period 120 to 200.5, and finds the load is almost zero.
		   Hence it decreases the CPU frequency to the minimum.

210		   Governor's timer fires, finds load as 100% in the last
		   10ms interval and increases the CPU frequency.

So, after the workload woke up and started running, the frequency was suddenly
dropped to absolute minimum, and after that, there was an unnecessary delay of
10ms (sampling period) to increase the CPU frequency back to a reasonable value.
And this pattern repeats for every wake-up-from-cpu-idle for that workload.
This can be quite undesirable for latency- or response-time sensitive bursty
workloads. So we need to fix the governor's logic to detect such wake-up-from-
cpu-idle scenarios and start the workload at a reasonably high CPU frequency.

One extreme solution would be to fake a load of 100% in such scenarios. But
that might lead to undesirable side-effects such as frequency spikes (which
might also need voltage changes) especially if the previous frequency happened
to be very low.

We just want to avoid the stupidity of dropping down the frequency to a minimum
and then enduring a needless (and long) delay before ramping it up back again.
So, let us simply carry forward the previous load - that is, let us just pretend
that the 'load' for the current time-window is the same as the load for the
previous window. That way, the frequency and voltage will continue to be set
to whatever values they were set at previously. This means that bursty workloads
will get a chance to influence the CPU frequency at which they wake up from
cpu-idle, based on their past execution history. Thus, they might be able to
avoid suffering from slow wakeups and long response-times.

However, we should take care not to over-do this. For example, such a "copy
previous load" logic will benefit cases like this: (where # represents busy
and . represents idle)

but it will be detrimental in cases like the one shown below, because it will
retain the high frequency (copied from the previous interval) even in a mostly
idle system:

(i.e., the workload finished and the remaining tasks are such that their busy
periods are smaller than the sampling interval, which causes the timer to
always get deferred. So, this will make the copy-previous-load logic copy
the initial high load to subsequent idle periods over and over again, thus
keeping the frequency high unnecessarily).

So, we modify this copy-previous-load logic such that it is used only once
upon every wakeup-from-idle. Thus if we have 2 consecutive idle periods, the
previous load won't get blindly copied over; cpufreq will freshly evaluate the
load in the second idle interval, thus ensuring that the system comes back to
its normal state.

[ The right way to solve this whole problem is to teach the CPU frequency
governors to also track load on a per-task basis, not just a per-CPU basis,
and then use both the data sources intelligently to set the appropriate
frequency on the CPUs. But that involves redesigning the cpufreq subsystem,
so this patch should make the situation bearable until then. ]

Experimental results:
+-------------------+

I ran a modified version of ebizzy (called 'sleeping-ebizzy') that sleeps in
between its execution such that its total utilization can be a user-defined
value, say 10% or 20% (higher the utilization specified, lesser the amount of
sleeps injected). This ebizzy was run with a single-thread, tied to CPU 8.

Behavior observed with tracing (sample taken from 40% utilization runs):
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Without patch:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
kworker/8:2-12137  416.335742: cpu_frequency: state=2061000 cpu_id=8
kworker/8:2-12137  416.335744: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40753  416.345741: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
kworker/8:2-12137  416.345744: cpu_frequency: state=4123000 cpu_id=8
kworker/8:2-12137  416.345746: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40753  416.355738: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
<snip>  ---------------------------------------------------------------------  <snip>
      <...>-40753  416.402202: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=swapper/8
     <idle>-0      416.502130: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/8 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40753  416.505738: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
kworker/8:2-12137  416.505739: cpu_frequency: state=2061000 cpu_id=8
kworker/8:2-12137  416.505741: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40753  416.515739: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
kworker/8:2-12137  416.515742: cpu_frequency: state=4123000 cpu_id=8
kworker/8:2-12137  416.515744: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy

Observation: Ebizzy went idle at 416.402202, and started running again at
416.502130. But cpufreq noticed the long idle period, and dropped the frequency
at 416.505739, only to increase it back again at 416.515742, realizing that the
workload is in-fact CPU bound. Thus ebizzy needlessly ran at the lowest frequency
for almost 13 milliseconds (almost 1 full sample period), and this pattern
repeats on every sleep-wakeup. This could hurt latency-sensitive workloads quite
a lot.

With patch:
~~~~~~~~~~~

kworker/8:2-29802  464.832535: cpu_frequency: state=2061000 cpu_id=8
<snip>  ---------------------------------------------------------------------  <snip>
kworker/8:2-29802  464.962538: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40738  464.972533: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
kworker/8:2-29802  464.972536: cpu_frequency: state=4123000 cpu_id=8
kworker/8:2-29802  464.972538: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40738  464.982531: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
<snip>  ---------------------------------------------------------------------  <snip>
kworker/8:2-29802  465.022533: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40738  465.032531: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
kworker/8:2-29802  465.032532: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40738  465.035797: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=swapper/8
     <idle>-0      465.240178: sched_switch: prev_comm=swapper/8 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40738  465.242533: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2
kworker/8:2-29802  465.242535: sched_switch: prev_comm=kworker/8:2 ==> next_comm=ebizzy
      <...>-40738  465.252531: sched_switch: prev_comm=ebizzy ==> next_comm=kworker/8:2

Observation: Ebizzy went idle at 465.035797, and started running again at
465.240178. Since ebizzy was the only real workload running on this CPU,
cpufreq retained the frequency at 4.1Ghz throughout the run of ebizzy, no
matter how many times ebizzy slept and woke-up in-between. Thus, ebizzy
got the 10ms worth of 4.1 Ghz benefit during every sleep-wakeup (as compared
to the run without the patch) and this boost gave a modest improvement in total
throughput, as shown below.

Sleeping-ebizzy records-per-second:
-----------------------------------

Utilization  Without patch  With patch  Difference (Absolute and % values)
    10%         274767        277046        +  2279 (+0.829%)
    20%         543429        553484        + 10055 (+1.850%)
    40%        1090744       1107959        + 17215 (+1.578%)
    60%        1634908       1662018        + 27110 (+1.658%)

A rudimentary and somewhat approximately latency-sensitive workload such as
sleeping-ebizzy itself showed a consistent, noticeable performance improvement
with this patch. Hence, workloads that are truly latency-sensitive will benefit
quite a bit from this change. Moreover, this is an overall win-win since this
patch does not hurt power-savings at all (because, this patch does not reduce
the idle time or idle residency; and the high frequency of the CPU when it goes
to cpu-idle does not affect/hurt the power-savings of deep idle states).

Signed-off-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Gautham R. Shenoy <ego@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
cpufreq: governor: remove copy_prev_load from 'struct cpu_dbs_common_info'

'copy_prev_load' was recently added by commit: 18b46ab (cpufreq: governor: Be
friendly towards latency-sensitive bursty workloads).

It actually is a bit redundant as we also have 'prev_load' which can store any
integer value and can be used instead of 'copy_prev_load' by setting it zero.

True load can also turn out to be zero during long idle intervals (and hence the
actual value of 'prev_load' and the overloaded value can clash). However this is
not a problem because, if the true load was really zero in the previous
interval, it makes sense to evaluate the load afresh for the current interval
rather than copying the previous load.

So, drop 'copy_prev_load' and use 'prev_load' instead.

Update comments as well to make it more clear.

There is another change here which was probably missed by Srivatsa during the
last version of updates he made. The unlikely in the 'if' statement was covering
only half of the condition and the whole line should actually come under it.

Also checkpatch is made more silent as it was reporting this (--strict option):

CHECK: Alignment should match open parenthesis
+		if (unlikely(wall_time > (2 * sampling_rate) &&
+						j_cdbs->prev_load)) {

Signed-off-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
cpufreq: Introduce new relation for freq selection
Introduce CPUFREQ_RELATION_C for frequency selection.
It selects the frequency with the minimum euclidean distance
to target. In case of equal distance between 2 frequencies,
it will select the greater freq.

Signed-off-by: Stratos Karafotis <stratosk@semaphore.gr>
cpufreq: ondemand: Eliminate the dead band effect in low load
Currently, ondemand calculates the target frequency proportional to load
using the formula:
	Target frequency = C * load
	where C = policy->cpuinfo.max_freq / 100

Though, in many cases, the minimum available frequency is pretty high and
the above calculation introduces a dead band from load 0 to
100 * policy->cpuinfo.min_freq / policy->cpuinfo.max_freq where the target
frequency is always calculated to less than policy->cpuinfo.min_freq and
the minimum frequency is selected.

For example: on Intel i7-3770 @ 3.4GHz the policy->cpuinfo.min_freq = 1600000
and the policy->cpuinfo.max_freq = 3400000 (without turbo). Thus, the CPU
starts to scale up at a load above 47.
On quad core 1500MHz Krait the policy->cpuinfo.min_freq = 384000
and the policy->cpuinfo.max_freq = 1512000. Thus, the CPU starts to scale
at load above 25.

Change the calculation of target frequency to eliminate the above effect using
the formula:

	Target frequency = A + B * load
	where A = policy->cpuinfo.min_freq and
	      B = (policy->cpuinfo.max_freq - policy->cpuinfo->min_freq) / 100

This will map load values 0 to 100 linearly to cpuinfo.min_freq to
cpuinfo.max_freq.

Also, use the CPUFREQ_RELATION_C in __cpufreq_driver_target to select the
closest frequency in frequency_table. This is necessary to avoid selection
of minimum frequency only when load equals to 0. It will also help for selection
of frequencies using a more 'fair' criterion.

In tables below is presented the difference in selected frequency for specific
values of load without and with this patch. On Intel i7-3770 @ 3.40GHz:
	Without			With
Load	Target	Selected	Target	Selected
0	0	1600000		1600000	1600000
5	170050	1600000		1690050	1700000
10	340100	1600000		1780100	1700000
15	510150	1600000		1870150	1900000
20	680200	1600000		1960200	2000000
25	850250	1600000		2050250	2100000
30	1020300	1600000		2140300	2100000
35	1190350	1600000		2230350	2200000
40	1360400	1600000		2320400	2400000
45	1530450	1600000		2410450	2400000
50	1700500	1900000		2500500	2500000
55	1870550	1900000		2590550	2600000
60	2040600	2100000		2680600	2600000
65	2210650	2400000		2770650	2800000
70	2380700	2400000		2860700	2800000
75	2550750	2600000		2950750	3000000
80	2720800	2800000		3040800	3000000
85	2890850	2900000		3130850	3100000
90	3060900	3100000		3220900	3300000
95	3230950	3300000		3310950	3300000
100	3401000	3401000		3401000	3401000

On ARM quad core 1500MHz Krait:
	Without			With
Load	Target	Selected	Target	Selected
0	0	384000		384000	384000
5	75600	384000		440400	486000
10	151200	384000		496800	486000
15	226800	384000		553200	594000
20	302400	384000		609600	594000
25	378000	384000		666000	702000
30	453600	486000		722400	702000
35	529200	594000		778800	810000
40	604800	702000		835200	810000
45	680400	702000		891600	918000
50	756000	810000		948000	918000
55	831600	918000		1004400	1026000
60	907200	918000		1060800	1026000
65	982800	1026000		1117200	1134000
70	1058400	1134000		1173600	1134000
75	1134000	1134000		1230000	1242000
80	1209600	1242000		1286400	1242000
85	1285200	1350000		1342800	1350000
90	1360800	1458000		1399200	1350000
95	1436400	1458000		1455600	1458000
100	1512000	1512000		1512000	1512000

Tested on Intel i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz and on ARM quad core 1500MHz Krait
(Android smartphone).

Signed-off-by: Stratos Karafotis <stratosk@semaphore.gr>
ext4: Speedup WB_SYNC_ALL pass called from sync(2)

When doing filesystem wide sync, there's no need to force transaction
commit (or synchronously write inode buffer) separately for each inode
because ext4_sync_fs() takes care of forcing commit at the end (VFS
takes care of flushing buffer cache, respectively). Most of the time
this slowness doesn't manifest because previous WB_SYNC_NONE writeback
doesn't leave much to write but when there are processes aggressively
creating new files and several filesystems to sync, the sync slowness
can be noticeable. In the following test script sync(1) takes around 6
minutes when there are two ext4 filesystems mounted on a standard SATA
drive. After this patch sync takes a couple of seconds so we have about
two orders of magnitude improvement.

      function run_writers
      {
        for (( i = 0; i < 10; i++ )); do
          mkdir $1/dir$i
          for (( j = 0; j < 40000; j++ )); do
            dd if=/dev/zero of=$1/dir$i/$j bs=4k count=4 &>/dev/null
          done &
        done
      }

      for dir in "$@"; do
        run_writers $dir
      done

      sleep 40
      time sync

Signed-off-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Merge branch 'master' of https://github.com/mrg666/android_kernel_mako