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Message-ID: <20100604081538.GC15181@elte.hu>
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 10:15:38 +0200
From: Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>
To: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org>
Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org>, tytso@....edu,
Brian Swetland <swetland@...gle.com>,
Neil Brown <neilb@...e.de>, Arve Hj?nnev?g <arve@...roid.com>,
Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
"Rafael J. Wysocki" <rjw@...k.pl>,
Alan Stern <stern@...land.harvard.edu>,
Felipe Balbi <felipe.balbi@...ia.com>,
Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
Florian Mickler <florian@...kler.org>,
Linux OMAP Mailing List <linux-omap@...r.kernel.org>,
Linux PM <linux-pm@...ts.linux-foundation.org>,
Alan Cox <alan@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@...e.de>,
Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
Kevin Hilman <khilman@...prootsystems.com>,
"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>
Subject: Re: suspend blockers & Android integration
* Arjan van de Ven <arjan@...radead.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Jun 2010 19:26:50 -0700 (PDT)
> Linus Torvalds <torvalds@...ux-foundation.org> wrote:
>
> > If the system is idle (or almost idle) for long times, I would heartily
> > recommend actively shutting down unused cores. Some CPU's are hopefully
> > smart enough to not even need that kind of software management, but I
> > suspect even the really smart ones might be able to take advantage of the
> > kernel saying: "I'm shutting you down, you don't have to worry about
> > latency AT ALL, because I'm keeping another CPU active to do any real
> > work".
>
> sadly the reality is that "offline" is actually the same as "deepest C
> state". At best.
>
> As far as I can see, this is at least true for all Intel and AMD cpus.
>
> And because there's then no power saving (but a performance cost), it's
> actually a negative for battery life/total energy.
>
> (lots of experiments inside Intel seem to confirm that, it's not just
> theory)
Well, the scheme would only be useful if it's _NOT_ just a deep C4 state, but
something that prevents tasks from being woken to that CPU for a good period
of time. Hot-unplugging that CPU achieves that (the runqueues are pulled), so
i think in Linus's idea makes sense in principle.
[ Or have you done deep-idle experiments to that effect as well? ]
I suspect it all depends on the cost: and our current hot-unplug and
hot-replug code is all but cheap ...
Ingo
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