Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Nick Piggin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I did propose doing unconditionally unlocked switches a while back
when my patch first popped up - you were against it then, but I guess
you've had second thoughts?
the reordering of switch_to() and the switch_mm()-related logic was that
made it really worthwile and clean. I.e. we pick a task atomically, we
switch stacks, and then we switch the MM. Note that this setup still
leaves the possibility open to move the stack-switching back under the
irq-disabled section in a natural way.
Yeah true. I didn't come up with code for you to look at at
that point anyway so you were obviously just speculating!
It does add an extra couple of stores to on_cpu, and a wmb() for
architectures that didn't previously need the unlocked switches. And
ia64 needs the extra interrupt disable / enable. Probably worth it?
it also removes extra stores to rq->prev_mm and other stores. I havent
measured any degradation on x86.
Yeah true, although that is just a single cacheline (which will be
hot for any context switch heavy workload).
On the other hand, I tried put oncpu near other fields that are
accessed during context switch, so maybe its not an issue.
If the irq disable/enable becomes widespread i'll do another patch to
push the irq-enabling into switch_to() so the arch can do the
stack-switch first and then enable interrupts and do the rest - but i
didnt want to complicate things unnecessarily for now.
Minor style request: I like that you're accessing ->on_cpu through
functions so the !SMP case doesn't clutter the code with ifdefs... but
can you do set_task_on_cpu(p) and clear_task_on_cpu(p) ?
yeah, i thought about these two variants and went for set_task_on_cpu()
so that it's less encapsulated (it's really just a conditional
assignment) and that it parallels set_task_cpu() use. But no strong
feelings either way. Anyway, lets try what we have now, i'll do the rest
in deltas.
Sounds good.
--
SUSE Labs, Novell Inc.