Re: [RFC PATCH v2] membarrier: expedited private command

From: Peter Zijlstra
Date: Tue Aug 01 2017 - 10:17:25 EST


On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 06:23:09AM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 01, 2017 at 12:22:03PM +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
>
> [ . . . ]
>
> > As to scheduler IPIs, those are limited to the CPUs the user is limited
> > to and are rate limited by the wakeup-latency of the tasks. After all,
> > all the time a task is runnable but not running, wakeups are no-ops.
>
> Can't that wakeup-latency limitation be overcome by a normal user simply
> by having lots of tasks to wake up, which then go back to sleep almost
> immediately? Coupled with very a low-priority CPU-bound task on each CPU?

Let me put it like this; there is no way to cause more interference
using IPIs then there is simply running while(1) loops ;-)