Re: [patch] i386 dynamic ticks 2.6.13-rc4 (code reordered)

[Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 04:44 pm, Thomas Renninger wrote:
> Pallipadi, Venkatesh wrote:
> >>-----Original Message-----
> >>From: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
> >>[mailto:linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of
> >>Stefan Seyfried
> >>Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2005 10:43 PM
> >>To: Con Kolivas
> >>Cc: tony@atomide.com; ck@vds.kolivas.org;
> >>tuukka.tikkanen@elektrobit.com; linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org;
> >>tytso@mit.edu
> >>Subject: Re: [patch] i386 dynamic ticks 2.6.13-rc4 (code reordered)
> >>
> >>Con Kolivas wrote:
> >>>>When I enabled dynamic tick using:
> >>>>
> >>>>	echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/timer/timer0/dyn_tick_state
> >>>>
> >>>>The number of ticks dropped down to 60-70 HZ, bus mastering activity
> >>>>jumpped up to being almost always active,
> >>>
> >>>Anyone know why this would happen?
> >>
> >>This is just a guess, without any actual code-reading:
> >>Maybe the C-state decision process just relies on being called every
> >>tick, so "after X ticks with no BM activity, go to next deeper
> >>C state".
> >>As long as 1000 ticks per second are coming in, everything is fine and
> >>we enter C[n+1] after X miliseconds without BM activity. Now if there
> >>are only 60-70 ticks per second, you never get X ticks without BM
> >>activity so you never go deeper than C2.
> >>
> >>Just a guess.
> >
> > That is correct. The C-state policy right now looks at jiffies to decide
> > on which C-state to go to (instead of absolute time).
> > This patch from Thomas should help with respect to going to proper
> > C-state in presence of dynamic tick.
> > http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/19/96
>
> My patch considered only the average last idle times and the average last
> bus master activities.
> It could happen that C3/C4 comes in too fast (not waiting long enough for
> bus master activity to settle down) which could result in failed
> transitions or misfunctionality of bus master devices.
> However, it worked on my machine and I could gain a lot of power savings.
> But be prepared that your WLAN card, USB peripherie or others might behave
> strangely or even that the machine freezes (if, it should freeze quite fast
> if idle).
> I plan to have a look at x86 and x86_64 dynamic tick patches again and
> rewrite the C-state patch, soon.
> Any hints on updated dyn-tick patches/projects crawling around are
> appreciated.

The most current patch for 2.6.13-rc6 is:
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/dyn-ticks/2.6.13-rc6-dtck-1.patch
but I would recommend waiting till Srivatsa gets out the SMP/updated version 
of this code as it may be quite different and you're best working off that 
codebase.

Cheers,
Con
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