[PATCH v5 11/12] sched: replace capacity_factor by utilization

[Morten Rasmussen]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 07:45:27PM +0100, Morten Rasmussen wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 09:01:59PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 03:07:44PM -0400, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > > On Mon, 15 Sep 2014, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > 
> > > Let's suppose a task running on a 1GHz CPU producing a load of 100.
> > > 
> > > The same task on a 100MHz CPU would produce a load of 1000 because that 
> > > CPU is 10x slower.  So to properly evaluate the load of a task when 
> > > moving it around, we want to normalize its load based on the CPU 
> > > performance.  In this case the correction factor would be 0.1.
> > > 
> > > Given those normalized loads, we need to scale CPU capacity as well.  If 
> > > the 1GHz CPU can handle 50 of those tasks it has a capacity of 5000.
> > > 
> > > In theory the 100MHz CPU could handle only 5 of those tasks, meaning it 
> > > has a normalized capacity of 500, but only if the load metric is already 
> > > normalized as well.
> > > 
> > > Or am I completely missing the point here?
> > 
> > So I was thinking of the usage as per the next patch; where we decide if
> > a cpu is 'full' or not based on the utilization measure. For this
> > measure we're not interested in inter CPU relations at all, and any use
> > of capacity scaling simply doesn't make sense.
> 
> Right. You don't need to scale capacity to determine whether a cpu is
> full or not if you don't have DVFS, but I don't think it hurts if it is
> done right. We need the scaling to figure out how much capacity is
> available.
> 
> > But I think you asking this question shows a 'bigger' problem in that
> > the Changelogs are entirely failing at describing the actual problem and
> > proposed solution. Because if that were clear, I don't think we would be
> > having this particular discussion.
> 
> Yes, the bigger problem of scaling things with DVFS and taking
> big.LITTLE into account is not addressed in this patch set. This is the
> scale-invariance problem that we discussed at Ksummit.

big.LITTLE is factored in this patch set, but DVFS is not. My bad.

Morten