timers/migration: Split per-capacity hierarchies

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Systems with heterogeneous CPU capacities, such as big.LITTLE, have
reported power issues since the introduction of the new timer migration
code.

Timers migrate from small capacity CPUs to big ones, degrading their
target residency and thus overall power consumption.

Solve this with splitting hierarchies per CPU capacity. For example in
a big.LITTLE machine, split a single hierarchy in two: one for big
capacity CPUs and another one for small capacity CPUs. This way global
timers only migrate across CPUs of the same capacity.

For simplicity purpose, split hierarchies keep the same number of
possible levels as if there were a single hierarchy, even though the
CPUs are distributed between multiple hierarchies. This could be a
problem on NUMA systems with heterogeneous CPU capacities (provided that
ever exists yet) where useless intermediate nodes may be created.
Solving this properly will imply on boot to know in advance how many
capacities are available and the number of CPUs for each of them.

Reported-by: Sehee Jeong <sehee1.jeong@samsung.com>
Suggested-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <frederic@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@kernel.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260423165354.95152-5-frederic@kernel.org

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Frederic Weisbecker 2026-04-23 18:53:52 +02:00 • committed by Thomas Gleixner

parent 3ba2548838

commit 098cbaad8e

2 changed files with 100 additions and 30 deletions

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123

kernel/time/timer_migration.c

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7

kernel/time/timer_migration.h

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