Thread (68 messages) 68 messages, 13 authors, 2011-07-12

[PATCH 00/10] mm: Linux VM Infrastructure to support Memory Power Management

From: Paul E. McKenney <hidden>
Date: 2011-06-10 15:11:30
Also in: linux-mm, lkml

On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 09:51:53AM +0900, Kyungmin Park wrote:
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 3:52 AM, Paul E. McKenney
[off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
On Sat, May 28, 2011 at 12:56:40AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
quoted
On Fri, 27 May 2011 18:01:28 +0530 Ankita Garg [off-list ref] wrote:
quoted
This patchset proposes a generic memory regions infrastructure that can be
used to tag boundaries of memory blocks which belongs to a specific memory
power management domain and further enable exploitation of platform memory
power management capabilities.
A couple of quick thoughts...

I'm seeing no estimate of how much energy we might save when this work
is completed. ?But saving energy is the entire point of the entire
patchset! ?So please spend some time thinking about that and update and
maintain the [patch 0/n] description so others can get some idea of the
benefit we might get from all of this. ?That estimate should include an
estimate of what proportion of machines are likely to have hardware
which can use this feature and in what timeframe.

IOW, if it saves one microwatt on 0.001% of machines, not interested ;)
FWIW, I have seen estimates on the order of a 5% reduction in power
consumption for some common types of embedded devices.
Wow interesting. I can't expect it can reduce 5% power reduction.
If it uses the 1GiBytes LPDDR2 memory. each memory port has 4Gib,
another has 4Gib. so one bank size is 64MiB (512MiB / 8).
So I don't expect it's difficult to contain the free or inactive
memory more than 64MiB during runtime.

Anyway can you describe the exact test environment? esp., memory type?
As you know there are too much embedded devices which use the various
environment.
Indeed, your mileage may vary.  It involved a very low-power CPU,
and the change enabled not just powering off memory, but reducing
the amount of physical memory provided.

Of course, on a server, you could get similar results by having a very
large amount of memory (say 256GB) and a workload that needed all the
memory only occasionally for short periods, but could get by with much
less (say 8GB) the rest of the time.  I have no idea whether or not
anyone actually has such a system.

							Thanx, Paul
Thank you,
Kyungmin Park
quoted
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?Thanx, Paul
quoted
Also, all this code appears to be enabled on all machines? ?So machines
which don't have the requisite hardware still carry any additional
overhead which is added here. ?I can see that ifdeffing a feature like
this would be ghastly but please also have a think about the
implications of this and add that discussion also.

If possible, it would be good to think up some microbenchmarks which
probe the worst-case performance impact and describe those and present
the results. ?So others can gain an understanding of the runtime costs.


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