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  • Viresh Kumar's avatar
    cpufreq: Add android's 'interactive' governor · 06ad2e9a
    Viresh Kumar authored
    Interactive governor has lived in Android sources for a very long time
    and this commit is based on the code present in following branch:
    
    https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/common
    
     android-4.4
    
    The Interactive governor is designed for latency-sensitive workloads,
    such as interactive user interfaces like the mobile phones and tablets.
    The interactive governor aims to be significantly more responsive to
    ramp CPU quickly up when CPU-intensive activity begins.
    
    Existing governors sample CPU load at a particular rate, typically every
    X ms and then update the frequency from a work-handler.  This can lead
    to under-powering UI threads for the period of time during which the
    user begins interacting with a previously-idle system until the next
    sample period happens.
    
    The 'interactive' governor uses a different approach.
    
    A real-time thread is used for scaling up, giving the remaining tasks
    the CPU performance benefit, unlike existing governors which are more
    likely to schedule ramp-up work to occur after your performance starved
    tasks have completed.
    
    The Android version of interactive governor also checks whether to scale
    the CPU frequency up soon after coming out of idle.  When the CPU comes
    out of idle, the governor check if the CPU sampling is overdue or not.
    If yes, it immediately starts the sampling.  Otherwise, the utilization
    hooks from the scheduler handle the sampling later.  If the CPU is very
    busy from exiting idle to when the evaluation happens, then it assumes
    that the CPU is under-powered and ramps it to MAX speed.
    
    If the CPU was not sufficiently busy to immediately ramp to MAX speed,
    then the governor evaluates the CPU load since the last speed
    adjustment, choosing the highest value between that longer-term load or
    the short-term load since idle exit to determine the CPU speed to ramp
    to.
    
    Idle notifiers will be be handled later and are not included for now.
    
    The core of this code is written and maintained (in Android
    repositories) by Mike Chan and Todd Poyner over a long period of time.
    
    Vireshk has made changes to to the governor to align it with the current
    practices followed with mainline governors, like using utilization hooks
    from the scheduler and handling kobject (for governor's sysfs directory)
    in a race free manner. And of course this included general cleanup of
    the governor as well.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Chan <mike@android.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTodd Poynor <toddpoynor@google.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarViresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
    06ad2e9a