Re: [RFC] Thread Migration Preemption

[Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>]

On Thu, 2007-07-05 at 17:51 -0400, Mathieu Desnoyers wrote:
> Thread Migration Preemption
> 
> This patch adds the ability to protect critical sections from migration to
> another CPU without disabling preemption.
> 
> This will be useful to minimize the amount of preemption disabling for the -rt
> patch. It will help leveraging improvements brought by the local_t types in
> asm/local.h (see Documentation/local_ops.txt). Note that the updates done to
> variables protected by migration_disable must be either atomic or protected from
> concurrent updates done by other threads.
> 
> Typical use:
> 
> migration_disable();
> local_inc(&__get_cpu_var(&my_local_t_var));
> migration_enable();
> 
> Which will increment the variable atomically wrt the local CPU.
> 
> Comments (such as how to integrate this in the already almost full
> preempt_count) are welcome.

Ingo and Thomas, this also would help with the IRQ thread running a
softirq issue.  We wouldn't need to bind to a CPU the thread. We could
simply disable the ability to migrate while the IRQ thread was handling
the softirqs.

-- Steve