Re: [PATCH] watchdog: Make sure the watchdog thread gets CPU onloaded system

[Andrew Morton]

On Thu, 15 Mar 2012 17:04:31 +0100
Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Thu, 2012-03-15 at 11:54 -0400, Don Zickus wrote:
> > > > Why did watchdog() reset the scheduling policy seven instructions
> > > > before exiting?  Seems pointless.
> > > 
> > > It has been introduced by Thomas in cba9bd22. To be honest I don't
> > > understand why it makes a sense?
> > 
> > Yeah I noticed that too.  I didn't bother questioning it either when
> > it
> > went in.  I just assumed Thomas and Peter know scheduling a lot better
> > than I do. :-) 
> 
> I just dug through my IRC logs and the reason is that running the entire
> exit path as a highest priority RT task incurs a latency spike to other
> tasks running on the system (313us). Since there's absolutely no point
> in running the exit path as a RT task, tglx made it not do that.

IRC logs, huh?


--- a/kernel/watchdog.c~a
+++ a/kernel/watchdog.c
@@ -349,6 +349,10 @@ static int watchdog(void *unused)
 
 		set_current_state(TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE);
 	}
+	/*
+	 * Drop the policy/priority elevation during thread exit to avoid a
+	 * scheduling latency spike.
+	 */
 	__set_current_state(TASK_RUNNING);
 	sched_setscheduler(current, SCHED_NORMAL, &param);
 	return 0;
_

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