ondemand selects the minimum frequency that can retire
a workload with negligible idle time -- ideally resulting in the highest
performance/power efficiency with negligible performance impact.
But on some systems and some workloads, this algorithm
is more performance biased than necessary, and
de-tuning it a bit to allow some performance impact
can save measurable power.
This patch adds a "powersave_bias" tunable to ondemand
to allow it to reduce its target frequency by a specified percent.
By default, the powersave_bias is 0 and has no effect.
powersave_bias is in units of 0.1%, so it has an effective range
of 1 through 1000, resulting in 0.1% to 100% impact.
In practice, users will not be able to detect a difference between
0.1% increments, but 1.0% increments turned out to be too large.
Also, the max value of 1000 (100%) would simply peg the system
in its deepest power saving P-state, unless the processor really has
a hardware P-state at 0Hz:-)
For example, If ondemand requests 2.0GHz based on utilization,
and powersave_bias=100, this code will knock 10% off the target
and seek a target of 1.8GHz instead of 2.0GHz until the
next sampling. If 1.8 is an exact match with an hardware frequency
we use it, otherwise we average our time between the frequency
next higher than 1.8 and next lower than 1.8.
Note that a user or administrative program can change powersave_bias
at run-time depending on how they expect the system to be used.
Signed-off-by: Venkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi at intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Alexey Starikovskiy <alexey.y.starikovskiy at intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dave Jones <davej@redhat.com>
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