Re: [PATCH] x86: Reduce the default HZ value

[Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>]

On Thu, 2009-05-07 at 11:01 -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:

> In general, I agree.  However, in the case where you have a single
> CPU-bound task running in user mode, you don't care that much about
> syscall performance.  So, yes, this would mean having yet another config
> variable that users running big CPU-bound scientific applications would
> need to worry about, which is not perfect either.
> 
> For whatever it is worth, the added overhead on entry would be something
> like the following:
> 
> void rcu_irq_enter(void)
> {
> 	struct rcu_dynticks *rdtp = &__get_cpu_var(rcu_dynticks);
> 
> 	if (rdtp->dynticks_nesting++)
> 		return;
> 	rdtp->dynticks++;
> 	WARN_ON_RATELIMIT(!(rdtp->dynticks & 0x1), &rcu_rs);
> 	smp_mb(); /* CPUs seeing ++ must see later RCU read-side crit sects */
> }
> 
> On exit, a bit more:
> 
> void rcu_irq_exit(void)
> {
> 	struct rcu_dynticks *rdtp = &__get_cpu_var(rcu_dynticks);
> 
> 	if (--rdtp->dynticks_nesting)
> 		return;
> 	smp_mb(); /* CPUs seeing ++ must see prior RCU read-side crit sects */
> 	rdtp->dynticks++;
> 	WARN_ON_RATELIMIT(rdtp->dynticks & 0x1, &rcu_rs);
> 
> 	/* If the interrupt queued a callback, get out of dyntick mode. */
> 	if (__get_cpu_var(rcu_data).nxtlist ||
> 	    __get_cpu_var(rcu_bh_data).nxtlist)
> 		set_need_resched();
> }
> 
> But I could move the callback check into call_rcu(), which would get the
> overhead of rcu_irq_exit() down to about that of rcu_irq_enter().

Can't you simply enter idle state after a grace period completes and
finds no pending callbacks for the next period. And leave idle state at
the next call_rcu()?