There are two cpuidle governors ladder and menu. While the ladder
governor is always available, if CONFIG_CPU_IDLE is selected, the
menu governor additionally requires CONFIG_NO_HZ.

A particular C state can be disabled by writing to the sysfs file
/sys/devices/system/cpu/cpuN/cpuidle/stateN/disable, but this mechanism
is only implemented in the menu governor. Thus, in a system where
CONFIG_NO_HZ is not selected, the ladder governor becomes default and
always will walk through all sleep states - irrespective of whether the
C state was disabled via sysfs or not. The only way to select a specific
C state was to write the related latency to /dev/cpu_dma_latency and
keep the file open as long as this setting was required - not very
practical and not suitable for setting a single core in an SMP system.

With this patch, the ladder governor only will promote to the next
C state, if it has not been disabled, and it will demote, if the
current C state was disabled.

Note that the patch does not make the setting of the sysfs variable
"disable" coherent, i.e. if one is disabling a light state, then all
deeper states are disabled as well, but the "disable" variable does not
reflect it. Likewise, if one enables a deep state but a lighter state
still is disabled, then this has no effect. A related section has been
added to the documentation.

Signed-off-by: Carsten Emde <C.Emde@osadl.org>
Signed-off-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rjw@sisk.pl>

Some C states of new CPU might be not good.  One reason is BIOS might
configure them incorrectly.  To help developers root cause it quickly, the
patch adds a new sysfs entry, so developers could disable specific C state
manually.

In addition, C state might have much impact on performance tuning, as it
takes much time to enter/exit C states, which might delay interrupt
processing.  With the new debug option, developers could check if a deep C
state could impact performance and how much impact it could cause.

Also add this option in Documentation/cpuidle/sysfs.txt.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: check kstrtol return value]
Signed-off-by: ShuoX Liu <shuox.liu@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Yanmin Zhang <yanmin_zhang@intel.com>
Reviewed-and-Tested-by: Deepthi Dharwar <deepthi@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>

Documentation for cpuidle infrastructure. (resend)

Signed-off-by: Venkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Len Brown <len.brown@intel.com>