Re: [PATCH v3 1/3] sched/fair: Move checking for nohz cpus after time check

From: Shrikanth Hegde
Date: Fri Jan 09 2026 - 10:14:43 EST


Hi Peter. Thanks for going through.

On 1/8/26 6:14 PM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
On Wed, Jan 07, 2026 at 12:21:23PM +0530, Shrikanth Hegde wrote:
NOHZ idle load balancer is kicked off only after time check. So move
the atomic read after the time check to access it only when needed.

When there are no idle CPUs(100% busy), even if the flag gets set to
NOHZ_STATS_KICK | NOHZ_NEXT_KICK, find_new_ilb will fail and
there will be no NOHZ idle balance. The current behaviour is retained.

Note: This patch doesn't solve any cacheline overheads. No improvement
in performance apart from saving a few cycles of atomic_read.

Note that atomic_read() == READ_ONCE() is just a regular load, but sure.

Cool. thanks. Let me keep it in the series then.