Re: [PATCH/RFC 0/5] cpu_relax: introduce yield, remove lowlatency

[David Miller]

From: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2016 17:08:54 +0200

> On 10/21/2016 04:57 PM, David Miller wrote:
>> From: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@xxxxxxxxxx>
>> Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2016 13:58:53 +0200
>> 
>>> For spinning loops people did often use barrier() or cpu_relax().
>>> For most architectures cpu_relax and barrier are the same, but on
>>> some architectures cpu_relax can add some latency. For example on s390
>>> cpu_relax gives up the time slice to the hypervisor. On power cpu_relax
>>> tries to give some of the CPU to the neighbor threads. To reduce the
>>> latency another variant cpu_relax_lowlatency was introduced. Before this
>>> is used in more and more places, lets revert the logic of provide a new
>>> function cpu_relax_yield that can spend some time and for s390 yields
>>> the guest CPU.
>> 
>> Sparc64, fwiw, behaves similarly to powerpc.
> 
> As sparc currently defines cpu_relax_lowlatency to cpu_relax, this patch set
> should be a no-op then for sparc, correct?
> 
> My intend was that cpu_relax should not add a huge latency but can certainly
> push some cpu power to hardware threads of the same core. This seems to be
> the case for sparc/power and some arc variants. 

Agreed.