The way cpufreq_governor_start() initializes j_cdbs->prev_load is
questionable.
First off, j_cdbs->prev_cpu_wall used as a denominator in the
computation may be zero. The case this happens is when
get_cpu_idle_time_us() returns -1 and get_cpu_idle_time_jiffy()
used to return that number is called exactly at the jiffies_64
wrap time. It is rather hard to trigger that error, but it is not
impossible and it will just crash the kernel then.
Second, j_cdbs->prev_load is computed as the average load during
the entire time since the system started and it may not reflect the
load in the previous sampling period (as it is expected to).
That doesn't play well with the way dbs_update() uses that value.
Namely, if the update time delta (wall_time) happens do be greater
than twice the sampling rate on the first invocation of it, the
initial value of j_cdbs->prev_load (which may be completely off) will
be returned to the caller as the current load (unless it is equal to
zero and unless another CPU sharing the same policy object has a
greater load value).
For this reason, notice that the prev_load field of struct cpu_dbs_info
is only used by dbs_update() and only in that one place, so if
cpufreq_governor_start() is modified to always initialize it to 0,
it will make dbs_update() always compute the actual load first time
it checks the update time delta against the doubled sampling rate
(after initialization) and there won't be any side effects of it.
Consequently, modify cpufreq_governor_start() as described.
Fixes: 18b46abd00 (cpufreq: governor: Be friendly towards latency-sensitive bursty workloads)
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael.j.wysocki@intel.com>
Acked-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
ba1ca654f3