What's the concern about setting irq thread's policy as SCHED_FIFO

From: Qin Chuanyu
Date: Wed Dec 03 2014 - 03:07:45 EST


I am doing network performance test under suse11sp3 and intel 82599 nic,
Becasuse the softirq is out of schedule policy's control, so netserver thread couldn't always get 100% cpu usage, then packet dropped in kernel udp socket's receive queue.

In order to get a stable result, I did some patch in ixgbe driver and then use irq_thread instead of softirq to handle rx.
It seems work well, but irq_thread's SCHED_FIFO schedule policy cause that when the cpu is limited, netserver couldn't work at all.

So I change the irq_thread's schedule policy from SCHED_FIFO to SCHED_NORMAL, then the irq_thread could share the cpu usage with netserver thread.

the question is:
What's the concrete reason about setting irq thread's policy as SCHED_FIFO?
Except the priority affecting the cpu usage, any function would be broken if irq thread change to SCHED_NORMAL?

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/