Scheduling in big and little cores based on interrupt policy

摘要

In a multi-core chip with core of different sizes, determining if an interrupt is directed to a bigger core (high power) 640 or a littler core (low power) 620 is based on a policy 610 for scheduling interrupts. The policy comprises an operational history of interrupts with saturation and frequency profiles. The littler core is selected if: the saturation profile indicates that the interrupt does not saturate the littler core, the frequency profile indicates that the interrupt does not occur over a threshold frequency, or the interrupt has not been specially designated. During boot-up, interrupts are masked from big cores. Predictive learning can be used where new tasks without execution history are started in big cores. Other parameters taken into account are: percentage of core utilization, processing performance ratio of littler to bigger cores, how long tasks run on a core and their priority, programmers hints or flags.