Re: [PATCH 0/3] nohz: Convert tick dependency mask to atomic_t

[Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>]

* Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:

> 
> * Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Mar 29, 2016 at 4:44 AM, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > Harmonizing thread_info::flags does not look easy, given how much assembly code
> > > accesses this field.
> > 
> > It might not be too bad.
> > 
> > For 32-bit architectures (which is still most of them), it's just a
> > 
> >    unsigned int/long -> atomic_t
> > 
> > and for 64-bit architectures you end up with three choices:
> > 
> >  - it's already 32-bit (alpha, ia64, x86):
> > 
> >         unsigned int -> atomic_t
> > 
> >  - little-endian long:
> > 
> >         atomic_t flags
> >         unsigned int padding;
> > 
> >  - big-endian long (only powerpc? Maybe there's a big-endian MIPS still?)
> > 
> >         unsigned int padding;
> >         atomic_t flags;
> 
> Hm, that indeed sounds fairly nice and doable - I thought some architectures do 
> have a task flag above bit 31, but that does not appear to be so ...
> 
> Right now we seem to have 27 bits defined in include/linux/sched.h, with 5 more 
> bits left for the future. Here's their current usage histogram in the kernel 
> source:
> 
>   PF_KTHREAD                    : 68
>   PF_MEMALLOC                   : 65

Argh, my reading comprehension skills suck today.

That's a totally useless analysis of task_struct::flags, while we want to convert 
thread_info::flags...

Thanks,

	Ingo