Re: [PATCH] sparse_irq aka dyn_irq v13

From: Mike Travis
Date: Thu Nov 13 2008 - 18:11:59 EST


David Miller wrote:
> From: Paul Mackerras <paulus@xxxxxxxxx>
> Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 09:19:13 +1100
>
>> Andrew Morton writes:
>>
>>> Other architectures want (or have) sparse interrupts. Are those guys
>>> paying attention here?
>> On powerpc we have a mapping from virtual irq numbers (in the range 0
>> to NR_IRQS-1) to physical irq numbers (which can be anything) and back
>> again. I think our approach is simpler than what's being proposed
>> here, though we don't try to keep the irqdescs node-local as this
>> patch seems to (fortunately our big systems aren't so NUMA-ish as to
>> make that necessary).
>
> This is exactly what sparc64 does as well, same as powerpc, and
> as Paul said it's so much incredibly simpler than the dyn_irq stuff.

One problem is that pre-defining a static NR_IRQ count is almost always
wrong when the NR_CPUS count is large, and should be adjusted as resources
require.

Large UV systems will take a performance hit from off-node accesses
when the CPU count (or more likely the NODE count) reaches some
threshold. So keeping as much interrupt context close to the
interrupting source is a good thing.
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