If you want both maximum performance and minimum consumption in this silly SBC world (ARM and not x86) you need benchmarks to be able to optimize stuff since defaults suck. Benchmarks that represent at least one use case you’re interested in (e.g. ‘server workloads in general’) are the prerequisit to
- test out tunables/settings (something we as users need to do since all we get from SoC vendors is crap suited for Android use cases)
- take decisions (wrt to scheduling for example on hybrid systems: which tasks or interrupts should be pinned to ‘little’ and which to ‘big’ cores, when do I need a big core since a little becomes a real-world bottleneck)
As if it would be that easy and as if there would be only the cpufreq governor. It’s about more than this and settings matter regardless which governor has been chosen (repeating myself again and again in this thread)
Example 1: clocking LPDDR with dmc_ondemand memory governor and the up_treshold=40 default → lower idle consumption at the cost of almost 15% performance loss. up_treshold=25 is better to keep idle consumption low but ramp up DRAM clockspeed immediately when needed and as such retain max performance at min idle consumption.
Example 2: I/O activity: ondemand/io_is_busy wins over schedutil if it’s about maximum I/O performance while keeping consumption at the minimum.
I’m testing with schedutil since IIRC kernel 4.6 or something like that but on ARM never had any success compared to ondemand/io_is_busy. And again my use cases are very limited (server workloads) and my main goal is minimum consumption and maximum performance combined. Which is possible just not with SoC vendors defaults since we’re dealing here with the ‘Android e-waste world’ needing a lot of adjustments for ‘Linux use cases’.
I’m not interested in any of these use cases so why should I care about this crap. Other than your perception (‘walls of constant load’) the chosen benchmarks are of actual value to help with developing settings that combine min consumption and max performance with the use cases I’m interested in since this is my only goal (if this wasn’t the goal why would I deal with this shitty ‘Android e-waste world’ and the horrible software support situation in the first place?)