Re: 2.6.20-rc6-mm3

From: Daniel Walker
Date: Fri Feb 02 2007 - 12:41:11 EST


On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 20:45 -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> Temporarily at
>
> http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/2.6.20-rc6-mm3/
>
> Will appear later at
>
> ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.20-rc6/2.6.20-rc6-mm3/
>

I was running likely profiling and I noticed that when I turn on the
"tickless" option I get the following line,

+unlikely | 21111208| 9367278 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597

This means that this line is 21111208 true, and 9367278 false.

This existed on bootup, and stayed after about 7 hours of runtime
(mostly idle). Since need_resched is a "static inline" there are
multiple instances of need_resched() in the kernel. If I turn off the
"tickless" feature this wrong unlikely disappears, and the output looks
like this,

unlikely | 0| 169 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 0| 94 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 0| 63 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 0| 19 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 0| 379 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 1| 202596 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 7| 205929 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597
unlikely | 6461| 271690 need_resched()@:include/linux/sched.h@1597

Only a little after boot. I suppose this could be a natural side effect
of the tickless feature but I thought I would report it anyway.

Daniel

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