On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 05:36:14PM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 04:40:24AM -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 01, 2016 at 06:30:35AM +0100, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> > > Sure, we all dislike IPIs, but I'm thinking this half-way point is
> > > sensible, no point in issuing user visible annoyance if indeed we can
> > > prod things back to life, no?
> > >
> > > Only if we utterly fail to make it respond should we bug the user with
> > > our failure..
> >
> > Sold! ;-)
> >
> > I will put together a patch later today.
> >
> > My intent is to hold off on the "upgrade cond_resched()" patch, one
> > step at a time. Longer term, I do very much like the idea of having
> > cond_resched() do both scheduling and RCU quiescent states, assuming
> > that this avoids performance pitfalls.
>
> Well, with the above change cond_resched() is already sufficient, no?
Maybe. Right now, cond_resched_rcu_qs() gets a quiescent state to
the RCU core in less than one jiffy, with my other change, this becomes
a handful of jiffies depending on HZ and NR_CPUS. I expect this
increase to a handful of jiffies to be a non-event.
After my upcoming patch, cond_resched() will get a quiescent state to
the RCU core in about ten seconds. While I am am not all that nervous
about the increase from less than a jiffy to a handful of jiffies,
increasing to ten seconds via cond_resched() does make me quite nervous.
Past experience indicates that someone's kernel will likely be fatally
inconvenienced by this magnitude of change.
Or am I misunderstanding what you are proposing?
> In fact, by doing the IPI thing we get the entire cond_resched*()
> family, and we could add the should_resched() guard to
> cond_resched_rcu().
So that cond_resched_rcu_qs() looks something like this, in order
to avoid the function call in the case where the scheduler has nothing
to do?
#define cond_resched_rcu_qs() \
do { \
if (!should_resched(current) || !cond_resched()) \
rcu_note_voluntary_context_switch(current); \
} while (0)
Thanx, Paul
