Re: vmstat: make vmstat_updater deferrable again and shut down on idle

[Christoph Lameter]

On Thu, 21 Jan 2016, Shiraz Hashim wrote:

> > On idle we fold counters immediately. So there is no loss of accuracy.
>
> vmstat is scheduled by shepherd or by itself (conditionally). In case shepherd
> is deferred and vmstat doesn't schedule itself, then vmstat needs to wait
> for shepherd to be up and then schedule it. This may end up in delayed status
> update for all live cpus. Isn't it ?

The shepherd runs on a processor with an active tick and thus should do
its duty every 2 seconds as scheduled. Small milisecond range deferrals do
not matter much.