Re: [PATCH] i386 No-Idle-Hz aka Dynamic-Ticks 3

[Zwane Mwaikambo]

On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Tony Lindgren wrote:

> As far as I remember enabling AMD stop grant disconnects all cpus. This
> means the system won't be able to do any work until the dyntick timer
> interrupt wakes up the system.
> 
> > Both requirements (idling all CPUs together vs individually) I think
> > will make the patch more complex.  Are such systems (which require having to 
> > idle all CPUs together) pretty common that we have to care about?!
> 
> Probably all AMD SMP based systems? Somebody with better knowledge should
> verify this.

It would be the K7 only.

> > But that may be too late on some CPUs. If dyn_tick->skip = 100, all
> > CPUs skip 100 ticks. However some CPUs may have timers that need to be
> > service much before that.
> 
> Not in the current case, as the system is completely idle until some
> interrupt wakes up the system. Of course it would be different if you make
> it per-CPU.

I once did a weekend version of this with SMP support and for the PIT, i 
had the last cpu to enter idle turn reprogram the PIT. Unfortunately this 
means waiting for all processors and isn't as effective as a result.

> Well we need to be able to do various things in the idle loop depending on
> the length of the estimated sleep. For example, if next_timer_interrupt is
> 2 jiffies away, we cannot do much. But if next_timer_interrupt is 2 seconds
> away, we can idle pretty much all devices.
> 
> > > But in any case on P4 systems the APIC timer is not the bottleneck as
> > > stopping or reprogramming PIT also kills APIC. (This does not happen on P3
> > > systems). So the bottleneck most likely is the length of PIT.
> > 
> > On these systems, do you disabled APIC (dyntick=noapic)?
> 
> Yeah. It only seems to work on P3 systems.

Odd, does reprogramming the APIC at that point get it going again?

	Zwane

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