Re: [PATCH] ipmi_si_intf: use usleep_range() instead of busy looping

From: Tejun Heo
Date: Tue Jul 09 2019 - 18:11:52 EST


On Tue, Jul 09, 2019 at 04:46:02PM -0500, Corey Minyard wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 09, 2019 at 02:06:43PM -0700, Tejun Heo wrote:
> > ipmi_thread() uses back-to-back schedule() to poll for command
> > completion which, on some machines, can push up CPU consumption and
> > heavily tax the scheduler locks leading to noticeable overall
> > performance degradation.
> >
> > This patch replaces schedule() with usleep_range(100, 200). This
> > allows the sensor readings to finish resonably fast and the cpu
> > consumption of the kthread is kept under several percents of a core.
>
> The IPMI thread was not really designed for sensor reading, it was
> designed so that firmware updates would happen in a reasonable time
> on systems without an interrupt on the IPMI interface. This change
> will degrade performance for that function. IIRC correctly the
> people who did the patch tried this and it slowed things down too
> much.

Also, can you point me to the exact patch? I'm kinda curious what
kind of timning they used.

Thanks.

--
tejun