Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2014 13:48:22 -0700
From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
To: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>,
        Mathieu Desnoyers <mathieu.desnoyers@efficios.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] rcu: Only pin GP kthread when full dynticks is actually
 used
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Reply-To: paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com
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On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 09:44:41AM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 06:21:32PM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> > On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 09:16:30AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > > Is it because we have dynticks CPUs staying too long in the kernel without
> > > > taking any quiescent states? Are we perhaps missing some rcu_user_enter() or
> > > > things?
> > > 
> > > Sort of the former, but combined with the fact that in-kernel CPUs still
> > > need scheduling-clock interrupts for RCU to make progress.  I could
> > > move this to RCU's context-switch hook, but that could be very bad for
> > > workloads that do lots of context switching.
> > 
> > Or I can restart the tick if the CPU stays in the kernel for too long without
> > a tick. I think that's what we were doing before but we removed that because
> > we never implemented it correctly (we sent scheduler IPI that did nothing...)
> 
> I wonder if timer slack would make sense here: when you have at least
> one RCU callback pending, set a timer with a huge amount of timer slack,
> and cancel it if you end up handling the callback via a trip through the
> scheduler.

But in this case, we need the tick even if the current CPU has no callbacks
because it might be in an RCU read-side critical section.

							Thanx, Paul

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