Re: [linux-audio-dev] Re: [announce] [patch] Voluntary Kernel Preemption Patch

Ingo Molnar
2004-07-21T09:50:25Z

* Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com> wrote:

> I can also add that La Monte H. P. Yarroll's patch to daemonize
> softirqs seems to provide major improvements in latency (does not help
> this problem of course). There has been at least one other patch
> posted to LKML that that does the same thing. Will this feature be in
> the kernel anytime soon?

we already 'daemonize' softirqs in the stock kernel if the load is high
enough. (this is what ksoftirqd does) So the only question is a tunable
to make this deferring of softirq load mandatory. Yarroll's patch is
quite complex, i dont think that is necessary. It also has at least one
conceptual problem, the NOP-ing of local_bh_disable/enable in case of
CONFIG_SOFTIRQ_THREADS is clearly wrong. Yarroll?

I've added a very simple solution to daemonize softirqs similar to
Yarroll's patch to the -H5 version of voluntary-preempt:

http://redhat.com/~mingo/voluntary-preempt/voluntary-preempt-2.6.8-rc2-H5

the 'level' of preemption is controlled via the value of
voluntary_preempt - a level of 2 (default) means that softirq-deferring
is done too. A level of 1 means only the extra preemption points are
activated, level 0 means the vanilla scheduling and softirq behavior.

below i've also attached a softirq.c patch against 2.6.8-rc2 that does
unconditional deferring. (this patch is of course not intended to be
merged upstream as-is, since normally we want to process softirqs right
after the irq context.)

Ingo

--- linux/kernel/softirq.c.orig
+++ linux/kernel/softirq.c
@@ -70,7 +70,7 @@ static inline void wakeup_softirqd(void)
*/
#define MAX_SOFTIRQ_RESTART 10

-asmlinkage void __do_softirq(void)
+asmlinkage void ___do_softirq(void)
{
struct softirq_action *h;
__u32 pending;
@@ -106,6 +106,23 @@ restart:
__local_bh_enable();
}

+asmlinkage void __do_softirq(void)
+{
+ /*
+ * 'preempt harder'. Push all softirq processing off to ksoftirqd.
+ */
+ if (local_softirq_pending())
+ wakeup_softirqd();
+}
+
+asmlinkage void _do_softirq(void)
+{
+ local_irq_disable();
+ ___do_softirq();
+ local_irq_enable();
+}
+
+
#ifndef __ARCH_HAS_DO_SOFTIRQ

asmlinkage void do_softirq(void)
@@ -340,7 +363,7 @@ static int ksoftirqd(void * __bind_cpu)
preempt_disable();
if (cpu_is_offline((long)__bind_cpu))
goto wait_to_die;
- do_softirq();
+ _do_softirq();
preempt_enable();
cond_resched();
}