Re: [PATCH] RT: Add priority-queuing and priority-inheritance to workqueue infrastructure

[Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>]

On 08/06, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 15:29 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 17:18 +0400, Oleg Nesterov wrote:
> > 
> > > Yes, I still disagree with the whole idea because I hope we can make
> > > something more simpler to solve the problem, but I must admit I don't
> > > quite understand what the problem is.
> > > 
> > > So, please consider a noise from my side as my attempt to help. And
> > > in fact, I am very curious about -rt tree, just I never had a time
> > > to study it :)
> > 
> > 
> > Well, the thing is, suppose we have 2 drivers both using keventd say a
> > NIC and some USB thingy.
> > 
> > Now the NIC is deemed important hand gets irq thread prio 90, and the
> > USB could not be cared less about and gets 10 (note that on -rt irq
> > handlers are threaded and run SCHED_FIFO).
> > 
> > So now you can get priority inversion in keventd. Say the USB thingy
> > schedules a work item which will be executed. Then during the execution
> > of this work the NIC will also schedule a work item. Now the NIC (fifo
> > 90) will have to wait for the USB work (fifo 10) to complete.
> 
> /me hits himself.
> 
> of course today everything will run on whatever prio keventd ends up,
> regardless of the prio of the submitter.
> 
> still this does not change the fundamental issue of a high prio piece of
> work waiting on a lower prio task.
       ^^^^^^^
waiting. This is a "key" word, and this was my (perhaps wrong) point.

> > I suspect most of the barrier/flush semantics could be replaced with
> > completions from specific work items.

Hm. But this is exactly how it works?

Oleg.