Message-ID: <486B0298.5030508@linux.intel.com>
Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:22:48 -0700
From: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@linux.intel.com>
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To: benh@kernel.crashing.org
CC: ksummit-2008-discuss@lists.linux-foundation.org,
       Linux Kernel list <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Delayed interrupt work, thread pools
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Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> Here's something that's been running in the back of my mind for some
> time that could be a good topic of discussion at KS.
> 
> In various areas (I'll come up with some examples later), kernel code
> such as drivers want to defer some processing to "task level", for
> various reasons such as locking (taking mutexes), memory allocation,
> interrupt latency, or simply doing things that may take more time than
> is reasonable to do at interrupt time or do things that may block.
> 
> Currently, the main mechanism we provide to do that is workqueues. They
> somewhat solve the problem, but at the same time, somewhat can make it
> worse.
> 
> The problem is that delaying a potentially long/sleeping task to a work
> queue will have the effect of delaying everything else waiting on that
> work queue.
> 

how much of this would be obsoleted if we had irqthreads ?
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