Hi Frederic and Chris, When the lmbench runs on the tickless isolated CPU, the context switch latency on this CPU is higher than the one on other CPU. The test platform is Linux 4.4.12 with NO_HZ_FULL on I.MX6Q sabresd. The following is the lmbench results about context switch: lmbench runs on nonspecific CPU: Context switching - times in microseconds - smaller is better ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Host OS 2p/0K 2p/16K 2p/64K 8p/16K 8p/64K 16p/16K 16p/64K ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw --------- ------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------- ------- imx6qsabr Linux 4.4.12- 12.6 12.8 16.1 26.6 42.1 36.5 70.0 lmbench runs on the isolated CPU: Context switching - times in microseconds - smaller is better ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Host OS 2p/0K 2p/16K 2p/64K 8p/16K 8p/64K 16p/16K 16p/64K ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw ctxsw --------- ------------- ------ ------ ------ ------ ------ ------- ------- imx6qsabr Linux 4.4.12- 17.7 21.9 27.6 42.0 40.3 44.0 77.1 >From the results, only the test case with 8p/64K on the isolated CPU has lower latency. To investigate the cause, I use the kernel event tracer to find out the events, user_enter and user_exit, of context_tracking would happen on tickless isolated CPU. These two events means that this CPU enters and exits the RCU extended quiescent state. Besides, the execution time of these two events are 3us and 2us, which are measured by ktime. Is this the reason why the context switch has higher latency on the tickless isolated CPU? Thanks, Regards, - Kang -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-api" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html