Re: [patch 00/20] timer: Refactor the timer wheel

[Thomas Gleixner]

On Wed, 15 Jun 2016, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 09:15:14AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 08:40:50AM -0000, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> > > The current timer wheel has some drawbacks:
> > > 
> > > 1) Cascading
> > > 
> > >    Cascading can be an unbound operation and is completely pointless in most
> > >    cases because the vast majority of the timer wheel timers are canceled or
> > >    rearmed before expiration.
> > > 
> > > 2) No fast lookup of the next expiring timer
> > > 
> > >    In NOHZ scenarios the first timer soft interrupt after a long NOHZ period
> > >    must fast forward the base time to current jiffies. As we have no way to
> > >    find the next expiring timer fast, the code loops and increments the base
> > >    time by one and checks for expired timers in each step. I've observed loops
> > >    lasting 1 ms!
> > > 
> > > There are some other issues caused by the above, but they are minor compare to
> > > those.
> > 
> > For SMP configurations, this passes light rcutorture testing.  For UP
> > builds, it complains about undefined symbols.  Builds succeed with
> > the following kneejerk patch.  Am retesting rcutorture.
> 
> And with the patch below, testing goes as well with your patch stack as
> it does without it.  So, with that patch (or equivalent):
> 
> Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> There were some complaints about increasing the size of the tiny
> configuration, FYI.

I know. The extra storage space for the deferrable stuff makes it larger along
with the extra code for avoiding all the crap which the current wheel suffers
from :) Do the tiny people need NOHZ?

> So, just out of curiosity, does anyone still run -rt on single-CPU systems?

Of course :)

Thanks,

	tglx