Re: + stupid-hack-to-make-mainline-build.patch added to -mm tree

Thomas Gleixner
2007-03-07T07:42:32Z

On Tue, 2007-03-06 at 17:44 -0800, Dan Hecht wrote:
> >>> 2) As I said above. The time accounting for virtualization needs to be
> >>> fixed in a generic way.
> >>>
> >>> I'm not going to accept some weird hackery for virtualization, which is
> >>> of exactly ZERO value for the kernel itself. Quite the contrary it will
> >>> make the cleanup harder and introduce another hard to remove thing,
> >>> which will in the worst case last for ever.
> >>>
> >> Okay, to confirm I'm on the same page as you, you want to move process
> >> time accounting from being periodic sampled based to being trace based?
> >> i.e. at the system-call/interrupt boundaries, read clocksource and
> >> compute directly the amount of system/user/process time?
> >
> > At least for the paravirt guests this is the correct approach. Once the
> > CPU vendors come up with a sane solution for a reliable and fast clock
> > source we might use that on real hardware as well.
> >
>
> I thought your preference was to not do things differently from real
> hardware? I guess this case you are okay with since you'd like to see
> the real hardware case follow eventually?

Real hardware _IS_ broken and slow. If we add the facilities for
virtualization we want it in a way, which is usable by real hardware as
well.

> > Yes, with todays hardware it is simply a PITA. PowerPC has some basic
> > support for this though, IIRC.
> >
>
> I think S390 maybe too.

One more reason to make it a generic solution rather than some extra
hackery.

tglx