Re: [GIT PULL] adaptive spinning mutexes

Ingo Molnar
2009-01-14T20:14:35Z

* Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:00:08 +0100
> Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
>
> >
> > * Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> >
> > > On Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:33:19 +0100 Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Please pull the adaptive-mutexes-for-linus git tree
> > >
> > > <fear>
> > >
> > > - It seems a major shortcoming that the feature is disabled if
> > > CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES=y. It means that lots of people won't test it.
>
> ^^^?
>
> > > - When people hit performance/latency oddities, it would be nice if
> > > they had a /proc knob with which they could disable this feature at
> > > runtime.
> > >
> > > This would also be useful for comparative performance testing.
> >
> > Yeah. From my other mail:
> >
> > > > We still have the /sys/debug/sched_features tunable under
> > > > CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y, so should this cause any performance regressions
> > > > somewhere, it can be pinned down and blamed back on this change
> > > > easily, without bisection and without rebooting the box.
> >
> > This kind of easy knob was included early on - this is how all those spin
> > versus no-spin numbers were done.
>
> Do people enable CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG?

If they suspect performance problems and want to analyze them?

Note that CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y is also the default.

> CONFIG_DEBUG_MUTEXES=n, CONFIG_SCHED_DEBUG=y is getting to be a pretty
> small subset?

Those two are the default config settings actually, so i'd expect it to be
the most commonly occuring combinations.

Ingo