On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 06:39:38 +0600
Roman Mamedov <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0200
> Siarhei Siamashka <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > A better solution is to really ramp up the CPU to the maximum clock
> > speed if we have some external power source connected (ACIN or VBUS).
> > Adhering to the "principle of least surprise", it makes sense to fork
> > the "ondemand" governor with some new name and make it the default.
> 
> A new governor (and a platform-specific one, no less)  is unlikely to ever be
> mainlined.

It's a bit too early to talk about mainlining. We need to solve the
problem at hand before planning too far ahead. I proposed this
particular solution with the upgrade path for sunxi-3.4 in mind.

Also I don't pretend to know much about power management. But the
current default cpufreq performance is simply unacceptable and
something has to be done about it. Enough is enough.

> Try mainlining those "fantasy" or "interactive", you'll more likely
> be <del>laughed out of the building</del> politely pointed to all the tunables
> of "ondemand", some of which I just listed in my other E-Mail.

Well, it is the primary responsibility of the kernel to provide an
efficient way to use the hardware. If the kernel fails to handle
this efficiently for any reasons, then it is doing a poor job and
needs to be improved.

And the kernel is indeed always evolving. New things are being
introduced whenever they are justified. And for example, do you
remember things like hyper-threading or turbo boost? Why haven't
those dudes been <del>laughed out of the building</del> politely
asked to design the hardware so that it plays nice with the existing
kernel without any need to introduce anything new?

But why am I even explaining these obvious things?

> If you *really* want to react to power events, there is no reason a userspace
> program can't change max/min_frequency of the ondemand governor, or even
> switch between ondemand and performance as the power situation allows; it 
> could
> be either a daemon or a oneshot script called from udev(?), if changes are 
> only
> required on plugging/unplugging of power source. In fact I think there should
> be something like that already (designed for laptops).

AFAIK on the x86 laptops at least part of this functionality is handled
by the BIOS and ACPI. Which makes them a little bit different from ARM
hardware.

In any case, I don't like the idea of forcing the userland to take
special care of sunxi specific power management when this can be better
done in the kernel. How the hell are you going to package it for many
different linux distributions?

-- 
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka

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