An issue with powerd..

[John Baldwin]

So I've had some issues where I get weird hangs when I run with powerd enabled 
on my laptop and I think I've finally tracked it down.  Note that this is on 
an older current with the older EC code, but the design flaw in powerd is 
still relevant even if the new EC code makes my laptop happier (I'm trying to 
update my laptop to more recent HEAD, but there's some weird scheduling bug 
that I haven't fixed yet in newer stuff).

Anyways, I was trying to debug the weird hangs I had when running with powerd 
(machine would go unresponsive and fans would spin up, and after a variable 
number of seconds it would come back and all the pending input (mouse 
movements, keypresses, etc.) would be processed).  I added some code to track 
how long it takes for GPE's to run that would print out on the console if one 
took more than 750ms as I had a feeling that something with ACPI was making 
the system busy.

It was also far worse in console mode than in X.  In console mode I found that 
sometimes the system would never "come back".

So I was running in console mode recently with my timing patches and noticed 
that when it hung it started warning about GPE events taking several 
_seconds_ to process, e.g. 2-3 seconds, or in some cases up to _30_ seconds.  
So, my theory is that powerd has lowered my CPU all the way down to 100mhz 
(easy to reproduce in non-X, just let the box sit with no apps running) and 
that for some reason the machine ends up in a "GPE storm" where it is 
spending all its time handling GPE's and never has any CPU left for userland 
apps (due to being at 100mhz).  The problem then is that powerd never runs to 
bump my CPU up to some reasonable speed.

In fact, anytime a completely idle box suddently gets a lot of kernel work 
(e.g. a sudden flow of packets) it could in theory end up trying to handle 
all this work at the reduced speed since the work has a higher priority than 
the powerd process.  To that end, I think that at least part of powerd needs 
to be in the kernel, or at least that the kernel should be more proactive 
about bumping the speed up when it resumes from Cx due to an interrupt.  A 
simple policy would be to bump up to full speed for any non-clock interrupt 
(possibly bumping up for a clock interrupt if we wake up softclock as well).

Thoughts?

-- 
John Baldwin