sched/uclamp: Add a new sysctl to control RT default boost value

RT tasks by default run at the highest capacity/performance level. When
uclamp is selected this default behavior is retained by enforcing the
requested uclamp.min (p->uclamp_req[UCLAMP_MIN]) of the RT tasks to be
uclamp_none(UCLAMP_MAX), which is SCHED_CAPACITY_SCALE; the maximum
value.

This is also referred to as 'the default boost value of RT tasks'.

See commit 1a00d999971c ("sched/uclamp: Set default clamps for RT tasks").

On battery powered devices, it is desired to control this default
(currently hardcoded) behavior at runtime to reduce energy consumed by
RT tasks.

For example, a mobile device manufacturer where big.LITTLE architecture
is dominant, the performance of the little cores varies across SoCs, and
on high end ones the big cores could be too power hungry.

Given the diversity of SoCs, the new knob allows manufactures to tune
the best performance/power for RT tasks for the particular hardware they
run on.

They could opt to further tune the value when the user selects
a different power saving mode or when the device is actively charging.

The runtime aspect of it further helps in creating a single kernel image
that can be run on multiple devices that require different tuning.

Keep in mind that a lot of RT tasks in the system are created by the
kernel. On Android for instance I can see over 50 RT tasks, only
a handful of which created by the Android framework.

To control the default behavior globally by system admins and device
integrator, introduce the new sysctl_sched_uclamp_util_min_rt_default
to change the default boost value of the RT tasks.

I anticipate this to be mostly in the form of modifying the init script
of a particular device.

To avoid polluting the fast path with unnecessary code, the approach
taken is to synchronously do the update by traversing all the existing
tasks in the system. This could race with a concurrent fork(), which is
dealt with by introducing sched_post_fork() function which will ensure
the racy fork will get the right update applied.

Tested on Juno-r2 in combination with the RT capacity awareness [1].
By default an RT task will go to the highest capacity CPU and run at the
maximum frequency, which is particularly energy inefficient on high end
mobile devices because the biggest core[s] are 'huge' and power hungry.

With this patch the RT task can be controlled to run anywhere by
default, and doesn't cause the frequency to be maximum all the time.
Yet any task that really needs to be boosted can easily escape this
default behavior by modifying its requested uclamp.min value
(p->uclamp_req[UCLAMP_MIN]) via sched_setattr() syscall.

[1] 804d402fb6f6: ("sched/rt: Make RT capacity-aware")

Signed-off-by: Qais Yousef <qais.yousef@arm.com>
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20200716110347.19553-2-qais.yousef@arm.com

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c
index 4aea67d3d552..1b4d2dc270a5 100644
--- a/kernel/sysctl.c
+++ b/kernel/sysctl.c
@@ -1815,6 +1815,13 @@ static struct ctl_table kern_table[] = {
 		.mode		= 0644,
 		.proc_handler	= sysctl_sched_uclamp_handler,
 	},
+	{
+		.procname	= "sched_util_clamp_min_rt_default",
+		.data		= &sysctl_sched_uclamp_util_min_rt_default,
+		.maxlen		= sizeof(unsigned int),
+		.mode		= 0644,
+		.proc_handler	= sysctl_sched_uclamp_handler,
+	},
 #endif
 #ifdef CONFIG_SCHED_AUTOGROUP
 	{