Re: CPU Hotplug rework

[Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2012 20:14:25 +0530, "Srivatsa S. Bhat" <srivatsa.bhat@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> There had been some discussion on CPU Hotplug redesign/rework
> some time ago, but it was buried under a thread with a different
> subject.
> (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1246208/focus=1246404)
> 
> So I am opening a new thread with an appropriate subject to discuss
> what needs to be done and how to go about it, as part of the rework.
> 
> Peter Zijlstra and Paul McKenney had come up with TODO lists for the
> rework, and here are their extracts from the previous discussion:

This is possible, but quite a lot of tricky auditing work.  There's an
underlying assumption that stop_machine is the slow part, since it feels
so heavy.

Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case in my testing.  The time
for hotplug seems to be moving all the threads around.  So how about:

(1) Let's not shutdown per-cpu kthreads, just leave them there to run
    if the CPU comes back.

(2) Do something more efficient with userspace threads than migrating
    them one at a time.

Otherwise, we risk doing a great deal of work and gaining nothing
(cleanups aside, of course).

Thanks,
Rusty.
-- 
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