Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Delayed interrupt work, thread pools

[Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Wed, 2008-07-02 at 16:00 -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote:
> 
> As for interrupt threads, those would help for some non-RT issues
> (having a better desktop feel) but not for the issue that Ben has been
> stating. I would be interested in knowing exactly what is needing to
> handle a page fault inside the kernel.  If we need to do something for a
> user space task, as soon as that task is found the work should be passed
> to that thread.

Not much is needed, as the mm is passed as an argument to
handle_mm_fault(). Page faults can already be handled by 'other'
processes (get_user_pages() doesn't have to be called in the context of
the target mm). I need to check if we may not get into funky issues down
at the vfs level if using a kernel thread without files and I may need
to dbl check if anything in that path tries to signal but that's about
it afaik.

Ben.