Hi Tejun,
On 26 November 2012 22:45, Tejun Heo tj@kernel.org wrote:
On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 04:08:45PM +0530, Viresh Kumar wrote:
I'm pretty skeptical about this. queue_work() w/o explicit CPU assignment has always guaranteed that the work item will be executed on the same CPU. I don't think there are too many users depending on that but am not sure at all that there are none. I asked you last time that you would at the very least need to audit most users but it doesn't seem like there has been any effort there.
My bad. I completely missed/forgot that comment from your earlier mails. Will do it.
That said, if the obtained benefit is big enough, sure, we can definitely change the behavior, which isn't all that great to begin with, and try to shake out the bugs quicky by e.g. forcing all work items to execute on different CPUs, but you're presenting a few percent of work items being migrated to a different CPU from an already active CPU, which doesn't seem like such a big benefit to me even if the migration target CPU is somewhat more efficient. How much powersaving are we talking about?
Hmm.. I actually implemented the problem discussed here: (I know you have seen this earlier :) )
http://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/2012/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/lpc2012-sch...
Specifically slides: 12 & 19.
I haven't done much power calculations with it and have tested it more from functionality point of view.
@Vincent: Can you add some comments here?
-- viresh