workqueues: Introduce new flag WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT for power oriented workqueues

Workqueues can be performance or power-oriented. Currently, most workqueues are
bound to the CPU they were created on. This gives good performance (due to cache
effects) at the cost of potentially waking up otherwise idle cores (Idle from
scheduler's perspective. Which may or may not be physically idle) just to
process some work. To save power, we can allow the work to be rescheduled on a
core that is already awake.

Workqueues created with the WQ_UNBOUND flag will allow some power savings.
However, we don't change the default behaviour of the system.  To enable
power-saving behaviour, a new config option CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT needs to
be turned on. This option can also be overridden by the
workqueue.power_efficient boot parameter.

tj: Updated config description and comments.  Renamed
    CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT to CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT.

Signed-off-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
This commit is contained in:
Viresh Kumar
2013-04-08 16:45:40 +05:30
committed by Tejun Heo
parent f722406faa
commit cee22a1505
4 changed files with 75 additions and 0 deletions

View File

@@ -263,6 +263,26 @@ config PM_GENERIC_DOMAINS
bool
depends on PM
config WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT
bool "Enable workqueue power-efficient mode by default"
depends on PM
default n
help
Per-cpu workqueues are generally preferred because they show
better performance thanks to cache locality; unfortunately,
per-cpu workqueues tend to be more power hungry than unbound
workqueues.
Enabling workqueue.power_efficient kernel parameter makes the
per-cpu workqueues which were observed to contribute
significantly to power consumption unbound, leading to measurably
lower power usage at the cost of small performance overhead.
This config option determines whether workqueue.power_efficient
is enabled by default.
If in doubt, say N.
config PM_GENERIC_DOMAINS_SLEEP
def_bool y
depends on PM_SLEEP && PM_GENERIC_DOMAINS