Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH 5/5] xen: RCU: avoid busy waiting until the end of grace period.

[Julien Grall <julien.grall@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Dario,

On 01/08/17 10:17, Dario Faggioli wrote:
> On Tue, 2017-08-01 at 09:54 +0100, Julien Grall wrote:
> > Hi Dario,
> >
> > On 27/07/2017 09:01, Dario Faggioli wrote:
> > > Instead of having the CPU where a callback is queued, busy
> > > looping on rcu_pending(), use a timer.
> > >
> > > In fact, we let the CPU go idla,e but we program a timer
> > > that will periodically wake it up, for checking whether the
> > > grace period has actually ended.
> > >
> > > It is kind of similar to introducing a periodic tick, but
> > > with a much more limited scope, and a lot less overhead. In
> > > fact, this timer is:
> > > - only active for the CPU(s) that have callbacks queued,
> > >   waiting for the end of a grace period;
> > > - only active when those CPU(s) are idle (and stopped as
> > >   soon as they resume execution).
> > If I read this correctly, it means on ARM the idling will now get
> > interrupted periodically. This is a bit unfortunate, given that if
> > you
> > have a CPU doing nothing, you would still interrupt it
> > intermittently.
> Not really periodically, not always, at least. What this really means
> is that a CPU that is idle, *but* have pending RCU callbacks, will be
> interrupted periodically to see if the grace period ended, so it can
> invoke the callbacks.
>
> As soon as this (callbacks being invoked) will have happened, we won't
> interrupt it any longer.
>
> And idle CPUs _without_ queued RCU callbacks, won't be interrupted at
> all.
Oh, the commit message is not clear about it. The wording gives the 
impression the timer will always be here on every idle CPU(s). In the 
case on active CPU(s) you specific mention the end of the grace period.
Thank you for the clarification and please disregard the rest of my 
e-mail then.
Cheers,

--
Julien Grall

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