Re: 2.6.19 -mm merge plans

Dave Jones
2006-09-22T20:13:38Z

On Fri, Sep 22, 2006 at 01:06:48PM +0000, Pavel Machek wrote:

> > would be nice to merge the -hrt queue that goes right ontop this queue.
> > Even if HIGH_RES_TIMERS is "default n" in the beginning. That gives us
> > high-res timers and dynticks which are both very important features to
> > certain classes of users/devices.
>
> dynticks give benefit of 0.3W, or 20minutes (IIRC) from 8hours on thinkpad
> x60... and they were around for way too long. (When baseline is
> hz=250, it is 0.5W from hz=1000 baseline). It would be cool to
> finally merge them.

I actually saw much bigger wins when I tested with an Athlon XP based compaq laptop
a year or so back. dynticks moved idle from being stuck at 21W to a sinusoidal
cycle in single watt increments between 22W->18W. It would never stay in the
lower ranges for long because of timers firing all the time.

See http://kernelslacker.livejournal.com/33637.html for details.

There is much interest right now in fixing up various bits of userspace
to not do braindead things with timers/polling. The gnome people
have recently come up with a timertop-esque hack (that goes a bit further)
for eg. See http://blogs.gnome.org/ryanl for details.
Arjan also recently did battle with a huge amount of really dumb userspace,
and dwmw2 has been tracking a bunch of these for OLPC:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/showdependencytree.cgi?id=204948

Damn all these busy people making me feel inadequate :)

Dave