On Friday, 11/17/2017 at 11:53 GMT, Sebastian Ott 
<[email protected]> wrote:
> It's a performance tuning knob - a mechanism for device drivers (and
> administrators) to specifiy that they expect an interrupt on the CPU 
that they
> used for IO submission.
>
> Since all interrupts are floating on s390, we rely on the channel 
subsystem to
> pick a good CPU to deliver the interrupt to. And most of the time the 
channel
> subsystem is good at this - also it has information a device driver has 
not
> (e.g. is a CPU in use by another guest).

So what you're saying, Sebastian, is that (a) fine-grained control over 
what devices interrupt what CPUs is not in the Z architecture, (b) it's 
not in there for a good reason,  (c) providing such a capability would 
adversely affect overall system performance (which is why it's not in the 
architecture in the first place).

It might, however, be an interesting idea to make the ioctl()s in the 
device driver a no-op instead of not being present or generating its own 
errnos.  That way folks can turn the knob, feel better, but not see any 
change since "it doesn't get any better than this".

Alan Altmark

Senior Managing z/VM and Linux Consultant
IBM Systems Lab Services
IBM Z Delivery Practice
ibm.com/systems/services/labservices
office: 607.429.3323
mobile; 607.321.7556
[email protected]
IBM Endicott

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