Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 04/13] rcu: Make RCU_FANOUT_LEAF help text more explicit about skew_tick

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 08:29:39PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 10:31:00AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > On Thu, Apr 13, 2017 at 07:04:34PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> > > And I have vague memories of it actually causing lock contention, but
> > > I've forgotten how that worked.
> > 
> > That is a new one on me.  I can easily see how not skewing ticks could
> > cause serious lock contention, but am missing how skewed ticks would
> > do so.
> 
> It could've been something like cacheline bouncing. Where with a
> synchronized tick, the (global) cacheline would get used by all CPUs on
> a node before heading out to the next node etc.. Where with a skewed
> tick, it would forever bounce around.

In other words, motivating the order of the skewed ticks to be guided
by hardware locality?

							Thanx, Paul