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>

1 files changed, 20 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/kernel/power/Kconfig b/kernel/power/Kconfig
index 5dfdc9ea180b..46455961a88f 100644
--- a/kernel/power/Kconfig
+++ b/kernel/power/Kconfig
@@ -263,6 +263,26 @@ config PM_GENERIC_DOMAINS
         bool
         depends on PM
 
+config WQ_POWER_EFFICIENT_DEFAULT
+        bool "Enable workqueue power-efficient mode by default"
+        depends on PM
+        default n
+        help
+          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 workqueue.power_efficient kernel parameter 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.
+
+          This config option determines whether workqueue.power_efficient
+          is enabled by default.
+
+          If in doubt, say N.
+
 config PM_GENERIC_DOMAINS_SLEEP
         def_bool y
         depends on PM_SLEEP && PM_GENERIC_DOMAINS