Re: Idle power fix regresses ebizzy performance (was 3.12-stable backport of NUMA balancing patches)

[Mike Galbraith <bitbucket@online.de>]

On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 09:01 +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote: 
> On Tue, 2014-01-14 at 02:31 -0500, Len Brown wrote: 
> > > This is a false alarm.
> > 
> > Thanks for the follow-up, Mel.
> > 
> > Agreed, it makes no sense for ebizzy measure 'throughput', when a
> > library debug bottleneck
> > prevents it from scaling past 3% CPU utilization.
> > 
> > Still, the broken configuration did find a difference due to the
> > addition of CLFLUSH on this box.
> > It makes me wonder if we will find issues on workloads that may depend
> > on the latency
> > of idle entry/exit, or perhaps sensitivity to the state of the cache
> > line containing thread_info->flags.
> > 
> > If somebody runs into such a workload, please try changing this 1 line
> > of intel_idle.c to limit
> > the CLFLUSH to C-states deeper than C1E, and let me know what you see.
> > 
> > - if (this_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_CLFLUSH_MONITOR))
> > + if ((eax > 1) && this_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_CLFLUSH_MONITOR))
> >           clflush((void *)&current_thread_info()->flags);
> 
> Hm, seems any high frequency switcher scheduling cross-core (pipe-test,
> or maybe a tbench pair) should show the cost to an affected box.

Oh yeah.. :) unless of course it's a Q6600 (poke poke).