Re: [PATCH 1/2] kthread_create

[Jeff Garzik]

Rusty Russell wrote:
> For #2, if you really can't wait for keventd, perhaps your own
> workqueue is in order?

Way too wasteful, and doing so is working around a fundamental failing 
of workqueues:  keventd gives no guarantee that your scheduled work will 
be executed this week, this month, or this year :)

keventd is used by two competing classes of users:  those who want 
low-latency, quick execution in task context (Tux-ish), and those who 
just want to run something in task context, where they might sleep 
(perhaps for a long time).

So it would be nice to have thread pool semantics occasionally found in 
userspace:  if thread pool is full when new work is queued, 
_temporarily_ increase the pool size (or create a one-shot kthread). 
Sure you have kthread creation overhead, but at least you have a 
reasonable guarantee that your work won't wait 5-30 seconds or more 
before being performed.

	Jeff



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