About Me
I am a Linux Kernel Developer working at IBM, Linux Technology Center, India. I work in the area of CPU Power Management, specifically enabling deep CPU Idle states and improving the CPU Frequency subsystem on IBM POWER platforms. I have been involved in the discussions around Power Aware Scheduling in the kernel community where we are trying to improve the power efficiency of the kernel. Of late I have been reviewing patches around Dynamic Ticks and am keenly interested in the Full Dynamic Ticks Infrastructure.
Project Details
References
The chapter on "Time Management" at http://www.e-reading.link/bookreader.php/142109/Professional_Linux_kernel_architecture.pdf
Status of Linux Dynamic Ticks: http://ertl.jp/~shinpei/conf/ospert13/slides/FredericWeisbecker.pdf
Tasks
The following tasks are listed in the increasing order of complexity:
To begin with, download the vanilla kernel.
Challenge Problem 1
Configure two different kernels, one with NO_HZ_IDLE=y and another with NO_HZ_IDLE=n. Boot each of these kernels and perform the following test on each.
Download the ebizzy benchmark from http://sourceforge.net/projects/ebizzy/. Compile and run this benchmark a few times. You must see consistent results. Record the number of records read. Download the powertop utility and run it while running the benchmark. Record the %time spent in different idle states.
Now compare the records read and %time spent in different idle states in both the above kernels and conclude as to which of the two has a better power efficiency.
Challenge Problem 2
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/frederic/dynticks-testing.git Clone this archive.
Run the test on two different kernels. Boot the first kernel, compiled with CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE = y in the config file, while boot the second kernel with CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL = y.
This page will be updated with more tasks soon.
Contact Info
You can email me at: preeti@linux.vnet.ibm.com
My IRC handle is preeti