Comment 24 for bug 1579278

@Haw Loeung: It would be good to understand in more detail your findings. As far as I know (and I am not an expert in this area), great care has been taken to avoid things like wakeups just to decide to go idle.

I did a test on my computer (Ubuntu 16.04 server, no GUI), but to avoid extra overheads, I used the /proc/timer_stats method. I also did the test over 300 seconds, so as to dilute influence from the command itself. Kernel: 4.8.0-040800rc5-generic

intel_pstate, "idle" system:
powersave: 14722 events, 49.073 events / second
performance: 14964 events, 49.879 events / second

intel_pstate: extra "idle" system:
powersave: 6381 total events, 21.269 events / second
performance: 6788 events, 22.626 events / second

Which kernel are you using? There was a flurry of high wakeups activity in June, but I thought it all got resolved. Note that there was a slight increase in wakeups with the recent change to a utilization based algorithm, but that was good thing because it solved a very long standing issue whereby the CPU frequency might not increase under high load for periodic workflows that just so happened to be idle on jiffy boundaries.

You mention "on some workloads". Could you be more specific? i.e. so that I can attempt to recreate your scenario on my computer.

My script:
$ cat ./set_cpu_timer_stats_2
#! /bin/bash
# Take a 300 second time sample
# A long time is needed to amortize/dilute the effect of the command itself.
# Reset the counters
echo "0" > /proc/timer_stats
echo "1" > /proc/timer_stats
# Now let the sample time elapse
sleep 300
# Now observe the timer counters
cat /proc/timer_stats
# And turn off timer stats.
echo "0" > /proc/timer_stats

What does "extra idle" mean?:
$ cat set_cpu_turn_off_services
#! /bin/bash
# Turn off some services to try to get "idle" to be more "idle"
sudo systemctl stop mysql.service
sudo systemctl stop apache2.service
sudo systemctl stop nmbd.service
sudo systemctl stop smbd.service
sudo systemctl stop cron.service
sudo systemctl stop winbind.service
sudo systemctl stop apt-daily.timer

Recent wakeups thread: http://marc.info/?t=146617757000003&r=1&w=2