CPU Idle Time Management¶
- Copyright
© 2019 Intel Corporation
- Author
Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
CPU Idle Time Management Subsystem¶
Every time one of the logical CPUs in the system (the entities that appear to fetch and execute instructions: hardware threads, if present, or processor cores) is idle after an interrupt or equivalent wakeup event, which means that there are no tasks to run on it except for the special "idle" task associated with it, there is an opportunity to save energy for the processor that it belongs to. That can be done by making the idle logical CPU stop fetching instructions from memory and putting some of the processor's functional units depended on by it into an idle state in which they will draw less power.
However, there may be multiple different idle states that can be used in such a
situation in principle, so it may be necessary to find the most suitable one
(from the kernel perspective) and ask the processor to use (or "enter") that
particular idle state. That is the role of the CPU idle time management
subsystem in the kernel, called CPUIdle
.
The design of CPUIdle
is modular and based on the code duplication avoidance
principle, so the generic code that in principle need not depend on the hardware
or platform design details in it is separate from the code that interacts with
the hardware. It generally is divided into three categories of functional
units: governors responsible for selecting idle states to ask the processor
to enter, drivers that pass the governors' decisions on to the hardware and
the core providing a common framework for them.
CPU Idle Time Governors¶
A CPU idle time (CPUIdle
) governor is a bundle of policy code invoked when
one of the logical CPUs in the system turns out to be idle. Its role is to
select an idle state to ask the processor to enter in order to save some energy.
CPUIdle
governors are generic and each of them can be used on any hardware
platform that the Linux kernel can run on. For this reason, data structures
operated on by them cannot depend on any hardware architecture or platform
design details as well.
The governor itself is represented by a struct cpuidle_governor object
containing four callback pointers, enable
, disable
,
select
, reflect
, a rating
field described
below, and a name (string) used for identifying it.
For the governor to be available at all, that object needs to be registered
with the CPUIdle
core by calling cpuidle_register_governor()
with
a pointer to it passed as the argument. If successful, that causes the core to
add the governor to the global list of available governors and, if it is the
only one in the list (that is, the list was empty before) or the value of its
rating
field is greater than the value of that field for the
governor currently in use, or the name of the new governor was passed to the
kernel as the value of the cpuidle.governor=
command line parameter, the new
governor will be used from that point on (there can be only one CPUIdle
governor in use at a time). Also, user space can choose the CPUIdle
governor to use at run time via sysfs
.
Once registered, CPUIdle
governors cannot be unregistered, so it is not
practical to put them into loadable kernel modules.
The interface between CPUIdle
governors and the core consists of four
callbacks:
enable
int (*enable) (struct cpuidle_driver *drv, struct cpuidle_device *dev);
The role of this callback is to prepare the governor for handling the (logical) CPU represented by the struct cpuidle_device object pointed to by the
dev
argument. The struct cpuidle_driver object pointed to by thedrv
argument represents theCPUIdle
driver to be used with that CPU (among other things, it should contain the list of struct cpuidle_state objects representing idle states that the processor holding the given CPU can be asked to enter).It may fail, in which case it is expected to return a negative error code, and that causes the kernel to run the architecture-specific default code for idle CPUs on the CPU in question instead of
CPUIdle
until the->enable()
governor callback is invoked for that CPU again.disable
void (*disable) (struct cpuidle_driver *drv, struct cpuidle_device *dev);
Called to make the governor stop handling the (logical) CPU represented by the struct cpuidle_device object pointed to by the
dev
argument.It is expected to reverse any changes made by the
->enable()
callback when it was last invoked for the target CPU, free all memory allocated by that callback and so on.select
int (*select) (struct cpuidle_driver *drv, struct cpuidle_device *dev, bool *stop_tick);
Called to select an idle state for the processor holding the (logical) CPU represented by the struct cpuidle_device object pointed to by the
dev
argument.The list of idle states to take into consideration is represented by the
states
array of struct cpuidle_state objects held by the struct cpuidle_driver object pointed to by thedrv
argument (which represents theCPUIdle
driver to be used with the CPU at hand). The value returned by this callback is interpreted as an index into that array (unless it is a negative error code).The
stop_tick
argument is used to indicate whether or not to stop the scheduler tick before asking the processor to enter the selected idle state. When thebool
variable pointed to by it (which is set totrue
before invoking this callback) is cleared tofalse
, the processor will be asked to enter the selected idle state without stopping the scheduler tick on the given CPU (if the tick has been stopped on that CPU already, however, it will not be restarted before asking the processor to enter the idle state).This callback is mandatory (i.e. the
select
callback pointer in struct cpuidle_governor must not beNULL
for the registration of the governor to succeed).reflect
void (*reflect) (struct cpuidle_device *dev, int index);
Called to allow the governor to evaluate the accuracy of the idle state selection made by the
->select()
callback (when it was invoked last time) and possibly use the result of that to improve the accuracy of idle state selections in the future.
In addition, CPUIdle
governors are required to take power management
quality of service (PM QoS) constraints on the processor wakeup latency into
account when selecting idle states. In order to obtain the current effective
PM QoS wakeup latency constraint for a given CPU, a CPUIdle
governor is
expected to pass the number of the CPU to
cpuidle_governor_latency_req()
. Then, the governor's ->select()
callback must not return the index of an indle state whose
exit_latency
value is greater than the number returned by that
function.
CPU Idle Time Management Drivers¶
CPU idle time management (CPUIdle
) drivers provide an interface between the
other parts of CPUIdle
and the hardware.
First of all, a CPUIdle
driver has to populate the states
array
of struct cpuidle_state objects included in the struct cpuidle_driver object
representing it. Going forward this array will represent the list of available
idle states that the processor hardware can be asked to enter shared by all of
the logical CPUs handled by the given driver.
The entries in the states
array are expected to be sorted by the
value of the target_residency
field in struct cpuidle_state in
the ascending order (that is, index 0 should correspond to the idle state with
the minimum value of target_residency
). [Since the
target_residency
value is expected to reflect the "depth" of the
idle state represented by the struct cpuidle_state object holding it, this
sorting order should be the same as the ascending sorting order by the idle
state "depth".]
Three fields in struct cpuidle_state are used by the existing CPUIdle
governors for computations related to idle state selection:
target_residency
Minimum time to spend in this idle state including the time needed to enter it (which may be substantial) to save more energy than could be saved by staying in a shallower idle state for the same amount of time, in microseconds.
exit_latency
Maximum time it will take a CPU asking the processor to enter this idle state to start executing the first instruction after a wakeup from it, in microseconds.
flags
Flags representing idle state properties. Currently, governors only use the
CPUIDLE_FLAG_POLLING
flag which is set if the given object does not represent a real idle state, but an interface to a software "loop" that can be used in order to avoid asking the processor to enter any idle state at all. [There are other flags used by theCPUIdle
core in special situations.]
The enter
callback pointer in struct cpuidle_state, which must not
be NULL
, points to the routine to execute in order to ask the processor to
enter this particular idle state:
void (*enter) (struct cpuidle_device *dev, struct cpuidle_driver *drv,
int index);
The first two arguments of it point to the struct cpuidle_device object
representing the logical CPU running this callback and the
struct cpuidle_driver object representing the driver itself, respectively,
and the last one is an index of the struct cpuidle_state entry in the driver's
states
array representing the idle state to ask the processor to
enter.
The analogous ->enter_s2idle()
callback in struct cpuidle_state is used
only for implementing the suspend-to-idle system-wide power management feature.
The difference between in and ->enter()
is that it must not re-enable
interrupts at any point (even temporarily) or attempt to change the states of
clock event devices, which the ->enter()
callback may do sometimes.
Once the states
array has been populated, the number of valid
entries in it has to be stored in the state_count
field of the
struct cpuidle_driver object representing the driver. Moreover, if any
entries in the states
array represent "coupled" idle states (that
is, idle states that can only be asked for if multiple related logical CPUs are
idle), the safe_state_index
field in struct cpuidle_driver needs
to be the index of an idle state that is not "coupled" (that is, one that can be
asked for if only one logical CPU is idle).
In addition to that, if the given CPUIdle
driver is only going to handle a
subset of logical CPUs in the system, the cpumask
field in its
struct cpuidle_driver object must point to the set (mask) of CPUs that will be
handled by it.
A CPUIdle
driver can only be used after it has been registered. If there
are no "coupled" idle state entries in the driver's states
array,
that can be accomplished by passing the driver's struct cpuidle_driver object
to cpuidle_register_driver()
. Otherwise, cpuidle_register()
should be used for this purpose.
However, it also is necessary to register struct cpuidle_device objects for
all of the logical CPUs to be handled by the given CPUIdle
driver with the
help of cpuidle_register_device()
after the driver has been registered
and cpuidle_register_driver()
, unlike cpuidle_register()
,
does not do that automatically. For this reason, the drivers that use
cpuidle_register_driver()
to register themselves must also take care
of registering the struct cpuidle_device objects as needed, so it is generally
recommended to use cpuidle_register()
for CPUIdle
driver
registration in all cases.
The registration of a struct cpuidle_device object causes the CPUIdle
sysfs
interface to be created and the governor's ->enable()
callback to
be invoked for the logical CPU represented by it, so it must take place after
registering the driver that will handle the CPU in question.
CPUIdle
drivers and struct cpuidle_device objects can be unregistered
when they are not necessary any more which allows some resources associated with
them to be released. Due to dependencies between them, all of the
struct cpuidle_device objects representing CPUs handled by the given
CPUIdle
driver must be unregistered, with the help of
cpuidle_unregister_device()
, before calling
cpuidle_unregister_driver()
to unregister the driver. Alternatively,
cpuidle_unregister()
can be called to unregister a CPUIdle
driver
along with all of the struct cpuidle_device objects representing CPUs handled
by it.
CPUIdle
drivers can respond to runtime system configuration changes that
lead to modifications of the list of available processor idle states (which can
happen, for example, when the system's power source is switched from AC to
battery or the other way around). Upon a notification of such a change,
a CPUIdle
driver is expected to call cpuidle_pause_and_lock()
to
turn CPUIdle
off temporarily and then cpuidle_disable_device()
for
all of the struct cpuidle_device objects representing CPUs affected by that
change. Next, it can update its states
array in accordance with
the new configuration of the system, call cpuidle_enable_device()
for
all of the relevant struct cpuidle_device objects and invoke
cpuidle_resume_and_unlock()
to allow CPUIdle
to be used again.