[G2 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting] bloof:
GOVERNORS AND HOTPLUGS - SOME VISUALS​

And discussions​

I ran combinations of governors (and some hotplugs) in Vellamo benchmarking tool in an uncontrolled test, purely for comparative purposes, using the "single core" test.

Uncontrolled means the tests were not carried out in the exact same situation each time, this happens mostly because cores heat up during tests and if you do not wait long enough then next test will not be under similar conditions. Also, in between test (or even during) some apps might have started, some RAM be used, and many more things could have changed.

I do not exactly how Vellamo chooses to represent the cpu usage in its "single core" tests, as there are obvious influences of hotplugs and other things.

All that being said, these tests are probably not reproducible exactly by other people, but I would suggest you do your own tests with your kernel to find out more about your various governors, hotplugs and combinations thereof.

I DON'T CARE ABOUT THE SCORE ITSELF! If you control your tests more you might look into some of the score details (example: I/O, etc) and learn something, I did NOT do that.

However, I found the following very useful in visualizing governors and hotplugs.

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GOVERNORS (based on BOEFFLA):

Setup:

- governor: as per name indicates

- hotplug: zzmove native default

- cpu max: 2.8 GHz

Just for reference:

- I/O scheduler: FIOPS

- GPU: 389 MHz

How to read the graphs:

They simply represent 6 different tests that Vellamo carries out in this benchmark. For each, they represent time in state for various cpu clocks, adding all cpus together.

I don't think the large dots are to scale, by that I mean that once they are a certain size they cannot get bigger, so a large dot at min frequency might not mean the same time spent as the same size large dot at max frequency. I just don't know.

So the way I read them is as follows: (again, this is how I read them, if you have other ideas please let me know.

- IMPORTANT: remember that using different hotplugs will change these graphs behaviors (I checked), so please use these comparatively only for your own set ups.

- look for large dots at low frequencies: the more there are, the more battery friendly the governor, even if there are a lot of large dots at max frequency.

- look for dots between min and max frequency: the more there are the more the governor uses all available frequencies steps. This usually means it is less aggressive and would be good for balanced styles with the phone doing a lot of small tasks (playing around with your phone). If a governor does NOT have a lot of small dots between min/max frequencies then it is very aggressive in going to max and can be very good as a balanced style using "performance governor" + "battery hotplug" and underclocked CPUs.

- look for large dots at max frequency: do not be fooled by large dots at max just below highest frequency, that's an artifact of the uncontrolled tests where the cores were probably a bit hotter to start with. Anyway, the more large dots at the top, the more performance driven the governor is of course. But you have to look at the dots at min frequency and the dots in between min/max to really judge a governor as pure performance as most governors will have large dots at the max frequency.

You can easily pick out the Battery versus the Pure Performance governors :)

Look at intellimm versus Interactive Performance for example.

In alphabetical order.

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"MULTICORE" TESTS FOR HOTPLUGS (based on BOEFFLA):

Setup:

- governor: zzmove battery and zzmove moderate

- hotplug: as per name

- cpu max: 2.8 GHz

Just for reference:

- I/O scheduler: FIOPS

- GPU: 389 MHz

These are the "multicore tests" from Vellamo. They take longer to run so I only did a few. For this one I varied the hotplugs to see the effect.

This test is much more susceptible to the fact this is an uncontrolled test (it runs longer, the cores are hotter, leading to even less similar conditions at each test).

As you can see the effect of the hotplug varies with the governor.

RESULTS:

- zzmove moderate: I believe these show for zzmove moderate that the zzmove hotplug brings out the desired performance factor more than the other hotplugs and seem to make it use intermediate frequencies more. Maybe.

I would rank the hotplugs as optimized/default making the governor more battery friendly (as expected, and also not much difference between the two).

The zzmove native hotplug does it more performance oriented, as expected also.

- zzmove battery: the default HP makes it more battery friendly, BUT THIS IS A SHORT TEST! Don't be fooled. The optimized HP is probably more battery friendly in the long run due to its idle/suspend characteristics (1 core max most of the time). The zzmove native hotplug seems to make it less battery friendly, but probably not by much (my interpretation), but once again this is as expected.

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GOVERNORS (based on DORIMANX):

See above section for details on the runs and plots.

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"SINGLE CORE TESTS FOR GOVERNORS (based on DORIMANX):

If not otherwise noted, hotplug is "Default LG"