On Mon, Oct 14, 2019 at 02:21:00PM -0700, Srinivas Pandruvada wrote:
> Some modern systems have very tight thermal tolerances. Because of this
> they may cross thermal thresholds when running normal workloads (even
> during boot). The CPU hardware will react by limiting power/frequency
> and using duty cycles to bring the temperature back into normal range.
>
> Thus users may see a "critical" message about the "temperature above
> threshold" which is soon followed by "temperature/speed normal". These
> messages are rate limited, but still may repeat every few minutes.
>
> The solution here is to set a timeout when the temperature first exceeds
> the threshold. If the CPU returns to normal before the timeout fires,
> we skip printing any messages. If we reach the timeout, then there may be
> a real thermal issue (e.g. inoperative or blocked fan) and we print the
> message (together with a count of how many thermal events have occurred).
> A rate control method is used to avoid printing repeatedly on these broken
> systems.
>
> Some experimentation with fans enabled showed that temperature returned
> to normal on a laptop in ~4 seconds. With fans disabled it took over 10
> seconds. Default timeout is thus set to 8 seconds, but may be changed
> with kernel boot parameter: "x86_therm_warn_delay". This default interval
> is twice of typical sampling interval for cooling using running average
> power limit from user space thermal control softwares.
>
> In addition a new sysfs attribute is added to show what is the maximum
> amount of time in miili-seconds the system was in throttled state. This
> will allow to change x86_therm_warn_delay, if required.
This description is already *begging* for this delay value to be
automatically set by the kernel. Putting yet another knob in front of
the user who doesn't have a clue most of the time shows one more time
that we haven't done our job properly by asking her to know what we
already do.
IOW, a simple history feedback mechanism which sets the timeout based on
the last couple of values is much smarter. The thing would have a max
value, of course, which, when exceeded should mean an anomaly, etc, but
almost anything else is better than merely asking the user to make an
educated guess.
> Suggested-by: Alan Cox <a...@linux.intel.com>
> Commit-comment-by: Tony Luck <tony.l...@intel.com>
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
What's that?
--
Regards/Gruss,
Boris.
https://people.kernel.org/tglx/notes-about-netiquette
