Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Delayed interrupt work, thread pools

From: Benjamin Herrenschmidt
Date: Thu Jul 03 2008 - 07:55:51 EST


On Thu, 2008-07-03 at 03:12 -0700, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > The question is: is that significantly less overhead than just spawning
> > a new full blown kernel thread ? enough to justify the complexity ? at
> > the end of the day, it means allocating a stack (which on ppc64 is still
> > 16K, I know it sucks)...
>
> I looked at this a while ago. And right now kernel_thread is fairly light.
> kthread_create has latency issues because we need to queue up a task on
> our kernel thread spawning daemon, and let it fork the child. Needing
> to go via the kthread spawning daemon didn't look fundamental, just something
> that was a challenge to sort out.

Yes. I was thinking that if it becomes an issue, we could special case
something in the scheduler to pop them.

Ben.


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