Re: [RFC][Patch v1 1/3] sched/isolation: API to get num of hosekeeping CPUs

Jacob Keller
2020-09-17T21:48:37Z

On 9/17/2020 1:11 PM, Bjorn Helgaas wrote:
> [+cc Ingo, Peter, Juri, Vincent (scheduler maintainers)]
>
> s/hosekeeping/housekeeping/ (in subject)
>
> On Wed, Sep 09, 2020 at 11:08:16AM -0400, Nitesh Narayan Lal wrote:
>> Introduce a new API num_housekeeping_cpus(), that can be used to retrieve
>> the number of housekeeping CPUs by reading an atomic variable
>> __num_housekeeping_cpus. This variable is set from housekeeping_setup().
>>
>> This API is introduced for the purpose of drivers that were previously
>> relying only on num_online_cpus() to determine the number of MSIX vectors
>> to create. In an RT environment with large isolated but a fewer
>> housekeeping CPUs this was leading to a situation where an attempt to
>> move all of the vectors corresponding to isolated CPUs to housekeeping
>> CPUs was failing due to per CPU vector limit.
>
> Totally kibitzing here, but AFAICT the concepts of "isolated CPU" and
> "housekeeping CPU" are not currently exposed to drivers, and it's not
> completely clear to me that they should be.
>
> We have carefully constructed notions of possible, present, online,
> active CPUs, and it seems like whatever we do here should be
> somehow integrated with those.
>

Perhaps "active" CPUs could be separated to not include the isolated CPUs?