Re: [ANNOUNCE] 3.8-rc6-nohz4

[Steven Rostedt]

On Thu, 2013-02-07 at 12:10 +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> * Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > I'll reply to this as I come up with comments.
> > 
> > First thing is, don't call it NO_HZ_FULL. A better name would 
> > be NO_HZ_CPU. I would like to reserve NO_HZ_FULL when we 
> > totally remove jiffies :-)
> 
> I don't think we want yet another config option named in a 
> weird way.
> 
> What we want instead is to just split NO_HZ up into its 
> conceptual parts:
> 
>    CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE
>    CONFIG_NO_HZ_USER_SPACE
>    CONFIG_NO_HZ_KERNEL_SPACE
> 
> Where the current status quo is NO_HZ_IDLE=y, and Frederic is 
> about to introduce NO_HZ_USER_SPACE=y. When jiffies get removed 
> we get NO_HZ_KERNEL_SPACE=y.

Saying NO_HZ_USER_SPACE is a bit of a misnomer. As we don't just stop
the tick for user space, but it may remained stopped when entering the
kernel. The rule is that when there's just a single task on a CPU, the
tick can stop (no scheduling work needed). But if the task triggers
something that may require a tick (like printk) then the tick will start
again. But just going into the kernel does not designate a tick restart.

Maybe a better name would be NO_HZ_SINGLE_TASK ?

> 
> The 'CONFIG_NO_HZ' meta-option, which we should leave for easy 
> configurability and for compatibility, should get us the 
> currently recommended default, which for the time being might 
> be:
> 
>    CONFIG_NO_HZ_IDLE=y
>    # CONFIG_NO_HZ_USER_SPACE is disabled
> 
> Btw., you could add CONFIG_NO_HZ_KERNEL_SPACE right away, just 
> keep it false all the time. That would document our future plans 
> pretty well.

Maybe the removal of jiffies would be NO_HZ_COMPLETE?


-- Steve


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