RE: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Yield to VCPU hcall, spinlock yielding

[Bryan S Rosenburg <rosnbrg@xxxxxxxxxx>]

"Ian Pratt" <m+Ian.Pratt@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote on 06/08/2005 05:29:21 PM:

> We might be able to come up with a cheaper hack for doing this. The
> notifaction scheme is already on the expensive side, and adding two
> extra passes through the scheduler could totally doom it.

I agree that whether we can tolerate
the cost of preemption notification interrupts is still very much an open
question.  I doubt that the additional costs of unblocking and blocking
a kernel thread will be decisive.

I don't view the high-priority kernel
thread idea as a "hack".  In conjunction with CONFIG_PREEMPT,
it is a straight-forward solution to a real problem:  From the notification
interrupt handler, how do you get the kernel to yield as quickly as possible
but only at such time as no kernel locks are held?  A newly-unblocked
high-priority thread will run at exactly the right time, with no new hacking
on Linux locking or scheduling code.

- Bryan
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