On Wed, Apr 23 2008, Nick Piggin wrote: > On Tue, Apr 22, 2008 at 12:50:30PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > > > > On Tue, 22 Apr 2008, Ingo Molnar wrote: > > > > > > ok. In which case the reschedule vector could be consolidated into that > > > as well (it's just a special single-CPU call). Then there would be no > > > new vector allocations needed at all, just the renaming of > > > RESCHEDULE_VECTOR to something more generic. > > > > Yes. > > > > Btw, don't get me wrong - I'm not against multiple vectors per se. I just > > wonder if there is any real reason for the code duplication. > > > > And there certainly *can* be tons of valid reasons for it. For example, > > some of the LAPIC can only have something like two pending interrupts per > > vector, and after that IPI's would get lost. > > > > However, since the queuing is actually done with the data structures, I > > don't think it matters for the IPI's - they don't need any hardware > > queuing at all, afaik, since even if two IPI's would be merged into one > > (due to lack of hw queueing) the IPI handling code still has its list of > > events, so it doesn't matter. > > > > And performance can be a valid reason ("too expensive to check the shared > > queue if we only have per-cpu events"), although I$ issues can cause that > > argument to go both ways. > > > > I was also wondering whether there are deadlock issues (ie one type of IPI > > has to complete even if a lock is held for the other type). > > > > So I don't dislike the patch per se, I just wanted to understand _why_ the > > IPI's wanted separate vectors. > > The "too expensive to check the shared queue" is one aspect of it. The > shared queue need not have events *for us* (at least, unless Jens has > changed the implementation a bit) but it can still have events that we > would need to check through. That is still the case, the loop works the same way still. To answer Linus' question on why it was done the way it was - the thought of sharing the IPI just didn't occur to me. For performance reasons I'd like to keep the current setup, but it's certainly a viable alternative for archs with limited number of IPIs available (like the mips case that Ralf has disclosed). -- Jens Axboe -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-arch" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html