On 8/8/07, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 14:16 -0700, Darren Hart wrote: > > > It seems to me that this patch will reduce the frequency of irqd/softirqd > > starvation, but the core problem still exists: softirq tasks can't migrate to > > other CPUs to perform their work if a higher priority task preempts them. > > I'm wondering if we want to keep special casing things to minimize the > > problem or not - seems to me the worst case is still the same - and isn't the > > worst case the only case that matters (for -rt)? > > > > softirq tasks should never migrate to other CPUs. A softirq exists in > every CPU. So if you trigger a softirq on CPU1 it will only run on CPU1. > If a high priority task preempts it, that same softirq can still run on > other CPUS. Only the thread that was preempted wont switch. But that's > the characteristic of softirqs, and that's how people who use them in > development expect them to work. Wouldn't a developer of a real-time system configure the system so that interrupts do not interfere with the real-time tasks running on a specific CPU? In other words, is this problem not simply a misconfiguration of the system? I personally redirect all interrupts away from the CPU's where my real-time tasks run and only allow the interrupts that I want to handle in my application on the CPU's where I handle them so as to minimize latency. Robert - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-rt-users" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html