Re: 2.6.21-rc1: known regressions (v2) (part 2)

Thomas Gleixner
2007-03-01T12:15:04Z

On Thu, 2007-03-01 at 23:05 +1100, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > > And that's the depressing part because of course I was interested in that
> > > as the original approach to the problem (and it was a big problem). When
> > > I spoke to Intel and AMD (of course to date no SMT AMD chip exists) at
> > > kernel summit they said it was too hard to implement hardware priorities
> > > well. Which is real odd since IBM have already done it with Power...
> > >
> > > Still I think it has been working fine in software till now, but now it
> > > has to deal with the added confusion of dynticks, so I already know what
> > > will happen to it.
> >
> > Well, it's not a dyntick problem in the first place. Even w/o dynticks
> > we go idle with local_softirq_pending(). Dynticks contains an explicit
> > check for that, which makes it visible.
>
> Oops I'm sorry if I made it sound like there's a dynticks problem. That was
> not my intent and I said as much in an earlier email. Even though I'm finding
> myself defending code that has already been softly tagged for redundancy,
> let's be clear here; we're talking about at most a further 70ms delay in
> scheduling a niced task in the presence of a nice 0 task, which is a
> reasonable delay for ksoftirqd which we nice the eyeballs out of in mainline.
> Considering under load our scheduler has been known to cause scheduling
> delays of 10 seconds I still don't see this as a bug. Dynticks just "points
> it out to us".

Well, dyntick might end up to delay it for X seconds as well, which _is_
observable and that's why the check was put there in the first place.

tglx