[PATCH 07/41] cpuset: Set up interface for nohz flag

[Christoph Lameter]

On Tue, 8 May 2012, Mike Galbraith wrote:

> On Tue, 2012-05-08 at 18:16 +0200, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> > On Tue, 2012-05-08 at 10:57 -0500, Christoph Lameter wrote:
>
> > isolcpus is a very limited hack that adds more pain that its worth. Its
> > yet another mask to check and its functionality is completely available
> > through cpusets.
>
> Agreed.

How would that work? By creating cpusets that only have a single cpu in
them?

> > You cannot cree multi-cpu partitions using isolcpus, you cannot
> > dynamically reconfigure it.
>
> Big plus for cpusets.

Why would you want to do anything like it? cpusets are confusing. You can
have a cpu be part of multiple cpusets. Which nohz setting applies for a
particular cpu then? If any of the cpusets have nohz set then it applies
to the cpu? And thus someone in a cpuset that does not has nohz set will
find that a cpu will have nohz functionality?

Its not a good match for this. You would want a per cpu attribute for
nohz.

> > And on the scheduler side cpusets doesn't add runtime overhead to normal
> > things, only sched_setaffinity() and a few other rare operations get
> > slightly more expensive. And it allows to reduce runtime overhead by
> > making the load-balancer domains smaller.
>
> Very big deal if you have a load that doesn't do all the performance 'i'
> dotting and 't' crossing it maybe could have, but ends up on a big box.

isolcpus are not part of load balancer domains.