Re: [PATCH] sparse_irq aka dyn_irq v13

[Mike Travis <travis@sgi.com>]

David Miller wrote:
> From: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
> Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:19:13 +1100
> 
>> Andrew Morton writes:
>>
>>> Other architectures want (or have) sparse interrupts.  Are those guys
>>> paying attention here?
>> On powerpc we have a mapping from virtual irq numbers (in the range 0
>> to NR_IRQS-1) to physical irq numbers (which can be anything) and back
>> again.  I think our approach is simpler than what's being proposed
>> here, though we don't try to keep the irqdescs node-local as this
>> patch seems to (fortunately our big systems aren't so NUMA-ish as to
>> make that necessary).
> 
> This is exactly what sparc64 does as well, same as powerpc, and
> as Paul said it's so much incredibly simpler than the dyn_irq stuff.

One problem is that pre-defining a static NR_IRQ count is almost always
wrong when the NR_CPUS count is large, and should be adjusted as resources
require.

Large UV systems will take a performance hit from off-node accesses
when the CPU count (or more likely the NODE count) reaches some
threshold.  So keeping as much interrupt context close to the
interrupting source is a good thing.