On 11/09/2023 4:04 pm, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 10, 2023 at 11:32:32AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>> I was hoping that we'd have some generic way to deal with this where
>> we could just say "this thing is reschedulable", and get rid of - or
>> at least not increasingly add to - the cond_resched() mess.
> Isn't that called PREEMPT=y ? That tracks precisely all the constraints
> required to know when/if we can preempt.
>
> The whole voluntary preempt model is basically the traditional
> co-operative preemption model and that fully relies on manual yields.
>
> The problem with the REP prefix (and Xen hypercalls) is that
> they're long running instructions and it becomes fundamentally
> impossible to put a cond_resched() in.
Any VMM - Xen isn't special here.
And if we're talking about instructions, then CPUID, GETSEC and
ENCL{S,U} and plenty of {RD,WR}MSRs in in a similar category, being
effectively blocking RPC operations to something else in the platform.
The Xen evtchn upcall logic in Linux does cond_resched() when possible.
i.e. long-running hypercalls issued with interrupts enabled can
reschedule if an interrupt occurs, which is pretty close to how REP
works too.
~Andrew
