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authorPeter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>2012-01-09 11:28:35 +0100
committerIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>2012-05-17 13:48:56 +0200
commit8e7fbcbc22c12414bcc9dfdd683637f58fb32759 (patch)
treea438021ddeadddd8f0745293aeb8c80dbe3c999c /Documentation/scheduler
parentfac536f7e4927f34d480dc066f3a578c743b8f0e (diff)
sched: Remove stale power aware scheduling remnants and dysfunctional knobs
It's been broken forever (i.e. it's not scheduling in a power aware fashion), as reported by Suresh and others sending patches, and nobody cares enough to fix it properly ... so remove it to make space free for something better. There's various problems with the code as it stands today, first and foremost the user interface which is bound to topology levels and has multiple values per level. This results in a state explosion which the administrator or distro needs to master and almost nobody does. Furthermore large configuration state spaces aren't good, it means the thing doesn't just work right because it's either under so many impossibe to meet constraints, or even if there's an achievable state workloads have to be aware of it precisely and can never meet it for dynamic workloads. So pushing this kind of decision to user-space was a bad idea even with a single knob - it's exponentially worse with knobs on every node of the topology. There is a proposal to replace the user interface with a single 3 state knob: sched_balance_policy := { performance, power, auto } where 'auto' would be the preferred default which looks at things like Battery/AC mode and possible cpufreq state or whatever the hw exposes to show us power use expectations - but there's been no progress on it in the past many months. Aside from that, the actual implementation of the various knobs is known to be broken. There have been sporadic attempts at fixing things but these always stop short of reaching a mergable state. Therefore this wholesale removal with the hopes of spurring people who care to come forward once again and work on a coherent replacement. Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl> Cc: Suresh Siddha <suresh.b.siddha@intel.com> Cc: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com> Cc: Vincent Guittot <vincent.guittot@linaro.org> Cc: Vaidyanathan Srinivasan <svaidy@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Cc: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1326104915.2442.53.camel@twins Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/scheduler')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.txt4
1 files changed, 0 insertions, 4 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.txt b/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.txt
index b7ee379b651b..443f0c76bab4 100644
--- a/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.txt
+++ b/Documentation/scheduler/sched-domains.txt
@@ -61,10 +61,6 @@ The implementor should read comments in include/linux/sched.h:
struct sched_domain fields, SD_FLAG_*, SD_*_INIT to get an idea of
the specifics and what to tune.
-For SMT, the architecture must define CONFIG_SCHED_SMT and provide a
-cpumask_t cpu_sibling_map[NR_CPUS], where cpu_sibling_map[i] is the mask of
-all "i"'s siblings as well as "i" itself.
-
Architectures may retain the regular override the default SD_*_INIT flags
while using the generic domain builder in kernel/sched.c if they wish to
retain the traditional SMT->SMP->NUMA topology (or some subset of that). This