On March 25, 2021 15:50, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

On Thu, Mar 25, 2021 at 8:18 PM Zhou Ti (x2019cwm) [off-list ref] wrote:

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On March 25, 2021 14:56, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:

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On Thursday, March 25, 2021 2:14:00 PM CET Frederic Weisbecker wrote:

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On Tue, Mar 16, 2021 at 04:08:08PM +0000, Zhou Ti (x2019cwm) wrote:

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But I don't think it's a good idea to handle this in callers, because logically the function shouldn't return negative values. Returning 0 directly would allow idle governors to get another chance to select again.

Hmm, I'm going to leave the last word to Rafael since cpuidle are the only
callers of this. In any case we need to fix it.

Yes, we do.

So I said that I preferred to address this in the callers and the reason why
is because, for example, for the teo governor it would be a matter of using
a different data type to store the tick_nohz_get_sleep_length() return value,
like in the (untested) patch below.

So at least in this case there is no need to add any new branches anywhere.

I'm still not sure about menu, because it is more complicated, but even if
that one needs an extra branch, that is a win already.

I would like to point out the potential trouble that fixing this issue in the
callers could cause.

1. This function is called multiple times in menu governor and TEO
governor.

What do you mean by "multiple times"?

Each of the governors calls it once per cycle and its previous return
value is not used in the next cycle at least in teo.

I remember a governor called this function twice in a cycle, I guess I remember 
wrong.

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I'm not sure that receiving results using signed integers is enough
to solve all the problems, in the worst case it may require increasing
the logical complexity of the code.

That is a valid concern, so it is a tradeoff between increasing the
logical complexity of the code and adding branches to it.

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2. This function is important for developing idle governor.
If the problem is not fixed in the function itself, then this potential
pitfall should be explicitly stated in the documentation.

That I can agree with.

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This is because
it is difficult to predict from the definition and naming of the function
that it might return a negative number. I actually discovered this anomaly
when I was doing data analysis on my own idle governor. For some idle control
algorithms, this exception return could lead to serious consequences,
because negative return logically won't happen.

Well, it's a matter of how to take the possible negative return value
into account so it does not affect the result of the computations.

I think it is challenging for some algorithms to take negative return values 
into account properly. For TEO (and even menu), it is possible to 
solve the problem by just changing the way the data is received is because the 
learning mechanism for both algorithms is simple. 

One of the interesting things about the CPUIdle subsystem is that it is well 
suited to introduce machine learning and probabilistic statistical methods.
This means that many of the more complex and data-sensitive algorithms can 
potentially be explored. In the best case we will still need to add additional 
code complexity to a new algorithm.

It would reduce a lot of unnecessary considerations (for example, highlight 
this shortcoming in the documentation) if we could ensure that this function 
would work as it is logically defined. But I don't really understand 
how much of a burden adding an extra branch would impose, so I don't know if 
this tradeoff is worth it.