workqueues: Introduce new flag WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT for power oriented workqueues
Workqueues can be performance or power-oriented. Currently, most workqueues are
bound to the CPU they were created on. This gives good performance (due to cache
effects) at the cost of potentially waking up otherwise idle cores (Idle from
scheduler's perspective. Which may or may not be physically idle) just to
process some work. To save power, we can allow the work to be rescheduled on a
core that is already awake.
Workqueues created with the WQ_UNBOUND flag will allow some power savings.
However, we don't change the default behaviour of the system. To enable
power-saving behaviour, a new config option CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT needs to
be turned on. This option can also be overridden by the
workqueue.power_efficient boot parameter.
tj: Updated config description and comments. Renamed
CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT to CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT.
Signed-off-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Reviewed-by: Amit Kucheria <amit.kucheria@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index c3bfacb..37dfd72 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -3320,6 +3320,21 @@
that this also can be controlled per-workqueue for
workqueues visible under /sys/bus/workqueue/.
+ workqueue.power_efficient
+ Per-cpu workqueues are generally preferred because
+ they show better performance thanks to cache
+ locality; unfortunately, per-cpu workqueues tend to
+ be more power hungry than unbound workqueues.
+
+ Enabling this makes the per-cpu workqueues which
+ were observed to contribute significantly to power
+ consumption unbound, leading to measurably lower
+ power usage at the cost of small performance
+ overhead.
+
+ The default value of this parameter is determined by
+ the config option CONFIG_WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT.
+
x2apic_phys [X86-64,APIC] Use x2apic physical mode instead of
default x2apic cluster mode on platforms
supporting x2apic.