[Xen-devel] Xen spinlock questions

["Jan Beulich" <jbeulich@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeremy,

considering to utilize your pv-ops spinlock implementation for our kernels,
I'd appreciate your opinion on the following thoughts:

1) While the goal of the per-CPU kicker irq appears to be to avoid all CPUs
waiting for a particular lock to get kicked simultaneously, I think this
doesn't have the desired effect. This is because Xen doesn't track what
event channel you poll for (through SCHEDOP_poll), and rather kicks all CPUs
polling for any event channel.

2) While on native not re-enabling interrupts in __raw_spin_lock_flags()
may be tolerable (but perhaps questionable), not doing so at least on
the slow path here seems suspicious.

3) Introducing yet another per-CPU IRQ for this purpose further
tightens scalability. Using a single, IRQF_PER_CPU IRQ should be
sufficient here, as long as it gets properly multiplexed onto individual
event channels (of which we have far more than IRQs). I have a patch
queued for the traditional tree that does just that conversion for the
reschedule and call-function IPIs, which I had long planned to get
submitted (but so far wasn't able to due to lack of testing done on the
migration aspects of it), and once successful was planning on trying to
do something similar for the timer IRQ. I am attaching that (2.6.26 based)
patch just for reference.

Thanks, Jan

Attachment: xen-ipi-per-cpu-irq.patch
Description: Text document

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