cpufreq: ondemand: Change the calculation of target frequency

The ondemand governor calculates load in terms of frequency and
increases it only if load_freq is greater than up_threshold
multiplied by the current or average frequency.  This appears to
produce oscillations of frequency between min and max because,
for example, a relatively small load can easily saturate minimum
frequency and lead the CPU to the max.  Then, it will decrease
back to the min due to small load_freq.

Change the calculation method of load and target frequency on the
basis of the following two observations:

 - Load computation should not depend on the current or average
   measured frequency.  For example, absolute load of 80% at 100MHz
   is not necessarily equivalent to 8% at 1000MHz in the next
   sampling interval.

 - It should be possible to increase the target frequency to any
   value present in the frequency table proportional to the absolute
   load, rather than to the max only, so that:

   Target frequency = C * load

   where we take C = policy->cpuinfo.max_freq / 100.

Tested on Intel i7-3770 CPU @ 3.40GHz and on Quad core 1500MHz Krait.
Phoronix benchmark of Linux Kernel Compilation 3.1 test shows an
increase ~1.5% in performance. cpufreq_stats (time_in_state) shows
that middle frequencies are used more, with this patch.  Highest
and lowest frequencies were used less by ~9%.

[rjw: We have run multiple other tests on kernels with this
 change applied and in the vast majority of cases it turns out
 that the resulting performance improvement also leads to reduced
 consumption of energy.  The change is additionally justified by
 the overall simplification of the code in question.]

Signed-off-by: Stratos Karafotis <stratosk@semaphore.gr>
Acked-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
This commit is contained in:
Stratos Karafotis
2013-06-05 19:01:25 +03:00
committed by Rafael J. Wysocki
parent 3b2f64d00c
commit dfa5bb6225
3 changed files with 8 additions and 42 deletions

View File

@@ -169,7 +169,6 @@ struct od_dbs_tuners {
unsigned int sampling_rate;
unsigned int sampling_down_factor;
unsigned int up_threshold;
unsigned int adj_up_threshold;
unsigned int powersave_bias;
unsigned int io_is_busy;
};