On 05/02/2018 05:17, Viresh Kumar wrote: > On 02-02-18, 15:30, Daniel Lezcano wrote: >> On 02/02/2018 11:42, Viresh Kumar wrote: >>> Here is how I see the whole thing now: >>> >>> - Yes we need individual support for both cpufreq and cpuidle cooling >>> devices, >>> and no one disagrees on that I believe. >>> >>> - There is nothing in the thermal framework that disallows both cpufreq and >>> cpuidle cooling devices to co-exist. Both would be part of the same >>> thermal >>> zone and so will get throttled with the same thermal sensor event. And so >>> we >>> will end up trying to cool down the SoC using both cpufreq and cpuidle >>> technique. >> >> No. It does not work because we will need different state for each >> cooling device and we need some logic behind. > > Right, but I thought the cooling-maps can help us specify different cooling > states for different cooling devices for the same trip point. Maybe my > understanding of that is incorrect. > >>> - Now I am just wondering if we really need the "combo" functionality or >>> not. >>> Can we fine tune the DT cpu-cooling properties (existing ones) for a >>> platform, >>> so that it automatically acts as a combo cooling device? I am not 100% >>> sure >>> its gonna fly, but just wanted to make sure its not possible to work >>> around >>> with and then only try the combo device thing. >>> >>> For example, suppose that with just cpufreq-cooling device we need to take >>> the >>> CPU down to 1 GHz from 2 GHz if we cross temperature 'X'. What if we can >>> change >>> this policy from DT and say the cpufreq-cooling device goes to 1.5 GHz and >>> cpuidle-cooling device takes us to idle for 'y' us, and the effect of >>> combination of these two is >= the effect of the 1 GHz for just the >>> cpufreq-cooling device. >>> >>> Is there any possibility of this to work ? >> >> It does not make sense. The combo does that automatically by computing >> the power equivalence more precisely. > > Sure, but that works by creating a virtual combo-cooling device instead of two > separate cooling devices and then there are several limitation (at least right > now) where it doesn't sense the real situation automagically. For example I > would expect the combo to just work with cpuidle if cpufreq isn't present and > as > soon as cpufreq comes in, covert itself to cpufreq+cpuidle. I was just trying > to > present another view at solving the problem at hand, not that one is better > than the other. At the first glance, it sounds interesting but I'm afraid that raises more corner-cases than it solves because we have to take into account all the combinations: cpuidle=0 && cpufreq=1, cpuidle=1 && cpufreq=0, cpuidle=1 && cpufreq=1 with dynamic code changes when the cpufreq driver is loaded/unloaded.
I'm not against this approach as well as merging all the cpu cooling devices into a single one but that won't be trivial and will need several iterations before reaching this level of features. IMO, we should keep the current approach (but handle the cpufreq loading/unloading) and then iteratively merge all the cooling device into a single one with policy change at runtime which will automatically handle the cpufreq load/unload. However I'm open to suggestion. -- <http://www.linaro.org/> Linaro.org │ Open source software for ARM SoCs Follow Linaro: <http://www.facebook.com/pages/Linaro> Facebook | <http://twitter.com/#!/linaroorg> Twitter | <http://www.linaro.org/linaro-blog/> Blog