While sending interrupts to a cpu to repeatedly wake a thread, on occasion that thread will take a full timer tick cycle (4002 usec in my case) to wakeup. The problem concerns a race condition in the code around the safe_halt() call in the default_idle() routine. Setting 'nohalt' on the kernel command line causes the long wakeups to disappear. void default_idle (void) { local_irq_enable(); while (!need_resched()) { --> if (can_do_pal_halt) --> safe_halt(); else A timer tick could arrive between the check for !need_resched and the actual call to safe_halt() (which does a pal call to PAL_HALT_LIGHT). By the time the timer tick completes, a thread that might now need to run could get held up for as long as a timer tick waiting for the halted cpu. I'm proposing that we disable irq's and check need_resched again before calling safe_halt(). Does anyone see any problem with this approach? Signed-off-by: Dimitri Sivanich <sivanich@xxxxxxx> Index: linux/arch/ia64/kernel/process.c =================================================================== --- linux.orig/arch/ia64/kernel/process.c 2007-08-02 15:05:56.427236082 -0500 +++ linux/arch/ia64/kernel/process.c 2007-08-06 19:42:20.147944967 -0500 @@ -198,9 +198,13 @@ default_idle (void) { local_irq_enable(); while (!need_resched()) { - if (can_do_pal_halt) - safe_halt(); - else + if (can_do_pal_halt) { + local_irq_disable(); + if (!need_resched()) { + safe_halt(); + } + local_irq_enable(); + } else cpu_relax(); } } - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ia64" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
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