* Scott Wood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > trying to make softirqs preemptible surely wont fly for 2.6 and it will > > also overly complicate the softirq model. What's so terminally wrong > > about adding preemption checks to the softirq paths? It should solve the > > preemption problem for good. The unbound softirq paths are well-known > > (mostly in the networking code) and already have preemption-alike > > checks. > > If every such loop in every softirq is taken care of, that would work > (though only until someone adds a new softirq that forgets to check > for preemption). I don't see any such checks in either the transmit > or receive network softirqs in vanilla 2.6.7, though (are they in a > patch, or am I overlooking them?), much less in each individual > driver. There are checks for excessive work (where "excessive" is not > well defined in terms of actual time), but none for need_resched() > except in a few isolated places.
i've added an infrastructure for easy softirq lock-break and preemption to the -H9 version of the voluntary-preempt patch: http://redhat.com/~mingo/voluntary-preempt/voluntary-preempt-2.6.8-rc2-H9 in -H9 i've fixed the most important softirq latency sources: - the RCU code this one is new and is really bad - it can literally execute tens of thousands of d_callback() functions within rcu_do_batch() causing millisecs of delays - e.g. triggered by the 'du /' test on a box with enough RAM. It affects UP just as much as SMP, in both preempt and non-preempt mode as well. - the timer code no real latencies in practice but in theory if enough timers are set to fire in the same jiffy it could be easily unbound. - net TX/RX code being the worst offender this had some throttling code already but it didnt listen to resched requests. It does now. it is really easy to do lock-break of softirqs, one only has to find a place where it's safe to enable softirq processing and do a cond_resched_softirq() call. Ingo
