On Thu, 26 Mar 2015 11:09:01 +0530 Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > A delayed work to schedule vmstat_shepherd() is queued at periodic intervals for > internal working of vmstat core. This work and its timer end up waking an idle > cpu sometimes, as this always stays on CPU0. > > Because we re-queue the work from its handler, idle_cpu() returns false and so > the timer (used by delayed work) never migrates to any other CPU. > > This may not be the desired behavior always as waking up an idle CPU to queue > work on few other CPUs isn't good from power-consumption point of view. > > In order to avoid waking up an idle core, we can replace schedule_delayed_work() > with a normal work plus a separate timer. The timer handler will then queue the > work after re-arming the timer. If the CPU was idle before the timer fired, > idle_cpu() will mostly return true and the next timer shall be migrated to a > non-idle CPU. > > But the timer core has a limitation, when the timer is re-armed from its > handler, timer core disables migration of that timer to other cores. Details of > that limitation are present in kernel/time/timer.c:__mod_timer() routine. > > Another simple yet effective solution can be to keep two timers with same > handler and keep toggling between them, so that the above limitation doesn't > hold true anymore. > > This patch replaces schedule_delayed_work() with schedule_work() plus two > timers. After this, it was seen that the timer and its do get migrated to other > non-idle CPUs, when the local cpu is idle. Shouldn't this be viewed as a shortcoming of the core timer code? vmstat_shepherd() is merely rescheduling itself with schedule_delayed_work(). That's a dead bog simple operation and if it's producing suboptimal behaviour then we shouldn't be fixing it with elaborate workarounds in the caller? -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>