• Stratos Karafotis's avatar
    cpufreq: ondemand: Change the calculation of target frequency · dfa5bb62
    Stratos Karafotis authored
    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: default avatarStratos Karafotis <stratosk@semaphore.gr>
    Acked-by: default avatarViresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
    dfa5bb62
cpufreq_ondemand.c 17.6 KB