Re: 2.4.10pre7aa1

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@caldera.de>]

On Mon, Sep 10, 2001 at 08:03:44PM +0200, Andrea Arcangeli wrote:
> > Do we really need yet-another per-CPU thread for this?  I'd prefer to have
> > the context thread per-CPU instead (like in Ben's asynchio patch) and do
> > this as well.
> 
> The first desing solution I proposed to Paul and Dipankar was just to
> use ksoftirqd for that (in short set need_resched and wait it to be
> cleared), it worked out nicely and it was a sensible improvement with
> respect to their previous patches. (also it was reliable, we cannot
> afford allocations in the wait_for_rcu path to avoid having to introduce
> fail paths) it was also a noop to the ksoftirqd paths.
> 
> However they remarked ksoftirqd wasn't a RT thread so under very high
> load it could introduce an higher latency to the wait_for_rcu calls.

Hmm, I don't see why latency is important for rcu - we only want to
free datastructures.. (mm load?).

On the other hands they are the experts on RCU, not I so I'll believe them.

> So in short if you really are in pain for 8k per cpu to get the best
> runtime behaviour and cleaner code I'd at least suggest to use the
> ksoftirqd way that should be the next best step.

My problem with this appropech is just that we use kernel threads for
more and more stuff - always creating new ones.  I think at some point
they will sum up badly.

	Christoph

-- 
Of course it doesn't work. We've performed a software upgrade.