RE: Arches that don't support PREEMPT

David Laight
2023-09-20T10:38:00Z

From: Linus Torvalds
> Sent: 19 September 2023 18:25
>
> On Tue, 19 Sept 2023 at 06:48, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
> <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> >
> > 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.
>
> It can definitely be problematic.
>
> Not the Kconfig file part, and not the preempt count part itself.
>
> But the fact that it has never been used and tested means that there
> might be tons of "this architecture code knows it's not preemptible,
> because this architecture doesn't support preemption".

Do distos even build x86 kernels with PREEMPT_FULL?
I know I've had issues with massive latencies caused graphics driver
forcing write-backs of all the framebuffer memory.
(I think it is a failed attempt to fix a temporary display corruption.)

OTOH SMP support and CONFIG_RT will test most of the code.

David

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