The Linux Plumbers 2013 Power-efficient Scheduling track is a Micro-conference to focus on scheduler topics in the area of efficient, power-aware scheduling.
“As mobile and embedded processors get more complex — and more numerous — the interest in improving the power efficiency of the scheduler has increased. While a number of power-related scheduler patches exist, none seem all that close to merging into the mainline. Getting something upstream always looked like a daunting task; scheduler changes are hard to make in general, these changes come from a constituency that the scheduler maintainers are not used to serving, and the existence of competing patches muddies the water somewhat. But now it seems that the complexity of the situation has increased again, to the point that the merging of any power-efficiency patches may have gotten even harder.The current discussion started at the end of May, when Morten Rasmussen posted some performance measurements comparing a few of the existing patch sets. The idea was clearly to push the discussion forward so that a decision could be made regarding which of those patches to push into the mainline. The numbers were useful, showing how the patch sets differ over a small set of workloads, but the apparent final result is unlikely to be pleasing to any of the developers involved: it is entirely possible that none of those patch sets will be merged in anything close to their current form, after Ingo Molnar posted a strongly-worded “line in the sand” message on how power-aware scheduling should be designed.”
This extract from the Johnatan Corbet's article Power aware scheduling meets a line in the sand shows the power management in the linux kernel has reached a limit in its design and some work should be done to integrate the idle/performance policies in the scheduler from the different PM blocks.
A number of patches with different approaches to add power-awareness to the Linux scheduler have been floated on LKML over the last year. The objective of this micro-conference is to gather developers and maintainers working on scheduler improvements and other interested parties to discuss alignment and next steps.
The schedule of the 2013 Microconference-Name Plumbers Micro Conference is as follows. Note presentation slides can be found on the Plumbers page by following the links to the abstracts:
This is a good place to record notes from your session. All too often, if notes were not written down, the session might as well not have happened.
This proposal is being entered by Nivedita Singhvi niv@us.ibm.com on behalf of developers who have expressed an interest. The scheduler folks will update this wiki page soon.
Runner is Morten Rasmussen morten.rasmussen@arm.com, among others. Additional contact: Preeti Murthy preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com
Key Maintainers: It would be nice to get some of the following maintainers: Thomas Gleixner, Paul Turner, Peter Z., Ingo Molnar, Rafael J. Wysocki, Frederic Wesibecker