Re: [PATCH] cpuidle: Add the shallow governors

[Roman Kagan]

On Fri, Oct 09, 2026 at 01:45:40PM +0100, Christian Loehle wrote:
> On 10/9/26 13:12, Roman Kagan wrote:
> > On Thu, Oct 08, 2026 at 07:29:43PM +0100, Christian Loehle wrote:
> >> On 10/8/26 19:17, Christian Loehle wrote:
> >>> On 10/8/26 19:06, Roman Kagan wrote:
> >>>> The idle states offered by a platform trade wakeup latency for energy
> >>>> savings, and there are situations where the trade is not worth making:
> >>>> while a latency-sensitive workload is running, or during a live update
> >>>> via kexec, where everything from the outgoing kernel stopping the
> >>>> workload to the incoming kernel resuming it is downtime, and deep idle
> >>>> states may lengthen it.
> >>>>
> >>>> The mechanisms currently available for that are all one-way.
> >>>> cpuidle.off=1, idle=poll and idle=halt can only be requested in the
> >>>> kernel command line and cannot be undone, and the PM QoS interfaces
> >>>> (/dev/cpu_dma_latency and the per-CPU pm_qos_resume_latency_us
> >>>> attribute) can only be used once user space is up, so they cannot cover
> >>>> the boot of the incoming kernel.
> >>>
> >>> You can also disable all but the shallowest idle state in sysfs:
> >>> echo 1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuX/cpuidle/stateX/disable
> >>>
> >>
> >> And I'd probably prefer having that exposed via the cmdline rather than
> >> two separate governors...
> > 
> > Doing this cmdline configuration per-cpu per-state is non-realistic.  I
> > guess you mean a single option that would express a policy, like "for
> > all cpus in the system, disable all but the shallowest state" or "...
> > all but the shallowest non-polling".  But policy is exactly what
> > governors are for.
> 
> Yes, I had something like
> cpuidle.max_exit_latency_us=<N>
> in mind that then sets the disable attribute for the applicable states.
> 
> > 
> > Why exactly does having two more separate simple, narrow-purpose
> > governors sound wrong to you?
> 
> Because it's a lot of duplicate code we have to maintain (and the
> documentation).

Fair.  But then PM QoS model appears to fit better.  I'll see to
reconcile it with the need to be able to set at boot and clear later.

Thanks,
Roman.