Hello, Viresh.
On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 04:08:45PM +0530, Viresh Kumar wrote:
Workqueues queues work on current cpu, if the caller haven't passed a preferred cpu. This may wake up an idle CPU, which is actually not required.
This work can be processed by any CPU and so we must select a non-idle CPU here. This patch adds in support in workqueue framework to get preferred CPU details from the scheduler, instead of using current CPU.
Most of the time when a work is queued, the current cpu isn't idle and so we will choose it only. There are cases when a cpu is idle when it queues some work. For example, consider following scenario:
- A cpu has programmed a timer and is IDLE now.
- CPU gets into interrupt handler due to timer and queues a work. As the CPU is currently IDLE, we can queue this work to some other CPU.
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. Given the seemingly low rate of migration and subtlety of such bugs, things could get nasty to debug.
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?
Thanks.