Re: [PATCH] rcu: Only pin GP kthread when full dynticks is actually used

[Josh Triplett]

On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 06:21:32PM +0200, Frederic Weisbecker wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2014 at 09:16:30AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > > Is it because we have dynticks CPUs staying too long in the kernel without
> > > taking any quiescent states? Are we perhaps missing some rcu_user_enter() or
> > > things?
> > 
> > Sort of the former, but combined with the fact that in-kernel CPUs still
> > need scheduling-clock interrupts for RCU to make progress.  I could
> > move this to RCU's context-switch hook, but that could be very bad for
> > workloads that do lots of context switching.
> 
> Or I can restart the tick if the CPU stays in the kernel for too long without
> a tick. I think that's what we were doing before but we removed that because
> we never implemented it correctly (we sent scheduler IPI that did nothing...)

I wonder if timer slack would make sense here: when you have at least
one RCU callback pending, set a timer with a huge amount of timer slack,
and cancel it if you end up handling the callback via a trip through the
scheduler.

- Josh Triplett
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