[Intel-gfx] [PATCH 0/9] GPU-bound energy efficiency improvements for the intel_pstate driver.

[Juri Lelli]

Hi,

On 11/04/18 09:26, Francisco Jerez wrote:
> Francisco Jerez <currojerez at riseup.net> writes:
> 
> > Hi Srinivas,
> >
> > Srinivas Pandruvada <srinivas.pandruvada at linux.intel.com> writes:
> >
> >> On Tue, 2018-04-10 at 15:28 -0700, Francisco Jerez wrote:
> >>> Francisco Jerez <currojerez at riseup.net> writes:
> >>> 
> >> [...]
> >>
> >>
> >>> For the case anyone is wondering what's going on, Srinivas pointed me
> >>> at
> >>> a larger idle power usage increase off-list, ultimately caused by the
> >>> low-latency heuristic as discussed in the paragraph above.  I have a
> >>> v2
> >>> of PATCH 6 that gives the controller a third response curve roughly
> >>> intermediate between the low-latency and low-power states of this
> >>> revision, which avoids the energy usage increase while C0 residency
> >>> is
> >>> low (e.g. during idle) expected for v1.  The low-latency behavior of
> >>> this revision is still going to be available based on a heuristic (in
> >>> particular when a realtime-priority task is scheduled).  We're
> >>> carrying
> >>> out some additional testing, I'll post the code here eventually.
> >>
> >> Please try sched-util governor also. There is a frequency-invariant
> >> patch, which I can send you (This eventually will be pushed by Peter).
> >> We want to avoid complexity to intel-pstate for non HWP power sensitive
> >> platforms as far as possible.
> >>
> >
> > Unfortunately the schedutil governor (whether frequency invariant or
> > not) has the exact same energy efficiency issues as the present
> > intel_pstate non-HWP governor.  Its response is severely underdamped
> > leading to energy-inefficient behavior for any oscillating non-CPU-bound
> > workload.  To exacerbate that problem the frequency is maxed out on
> > frequent IO waiting just like the current intel_pstate cpu-load
> 
> "just like" here is possibly somewhat unfair to the schedutil governor,
> admittedly its progressive IOWAIT boosting behavior seems somewhat less
> wasteful than the intel_pstate non-HWP governor's IOWAIT boosting
> behavior, but it's still largely unhelpful on IO-bound conditions.

Sorry if I jump in out of the blue, but what you are trying to solve
looks very similar to what IPA [1] is targeting as well. I might be
wrong (I'll try to spend more time reviewing your set), but my first
impression is that we should try to solve similar problems with a more
general approach that could benefit different sys/archs.

I'm Cc-ing some Arm folks...

Best,

- Juri

[1] https://developer.arm.com/open-source/intelligent-power-allocation