Re: Arches that don't support PREEMPT

Peter Zijlstra
2023-09-19T14:16:54Z

On Tue, Sep 19, 2023 at 03:48:09PM +0200, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> On Tue, 2023-09-19 at 15:42 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > > The agreement to kill off ia64 wasn't an invitation to kill off other stuff
> > > that people are still working on! Can we please not do this?
> >
> > If you're working on one of them, then surely it's a simple matter of
> > working on adding CONFIG_PREEMPT support :-)
>
> As Geert poined out, I'm not seeing anything particular problematic with the
> architectures lacking CONFIG_PREEMPT at the moment. This seems to be more
> something about organizing KConfig files.

The plan in the parent thread is to remove PREEMPT_NONE and
PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY and only keep PREEMPT_FULL.

> I find it a bit unfair that maintainers of architectures that have huge companies
> behind them use their manpower to urge less popular architectures for removal just
> because they don't have 150 people working on the port so they can keep up with
> design changes quickly.

PREEMPT isn't something new. Also, I don't think the arch part for
actually supporting it is particularly hard, mostly it is sticking the
preempt_schedule_irq() call in return from interrupt code path.

If you convert the arch to generic-entry (a much larger undertaking)
then you get this for free.