Re: [BUG nohz]: wrong user and system time accounting

From: Frederic Weisbecker
Date: Thu Mar 30 2017 - 08:52:05 EST


On Thu, Mar 30, 2017 at 06:27:31AM +0200, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Wed, 2017-03-29 at 16:08 -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> > A random offset, or better yet a somewhat randomized
> > tick length to make sure that simultaneous ticks are
> > fairly rare and the vtime sampling does not end up
> > "in phase" with the jiffies incrementing, could make
> > the accounting work right again.
>
> That improves jitter, especially on big boxen. I have an 8 socket box
> that thinks it's an extra large PC, there, collision avoidance matters
> hugely. I couldn't reproduce bean counting woes, no idea if collision
> avoidance will help that.

Out of curiosity, where is the main contention between ticks? I indeed
know some locks that can be taken on special cases, such as posix cpu timers.

Also, why does it raise power consumption issues?

Thanks.