On Tue, 2013-03-26 at 08:29 -0700, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
Isn't this basically related to picking the NO_HZ cpu; if the system isn't fully symmetric with its power gates you want the NO_HZ cpu to be the 'special' cpu. If it is symmetric we really don't care which core is left 'running' and we can even select a new pack cpu from the idle cores once the old one is fully utilized.
you don't really care much sure, but there's some advantages for sorting "all the way left", e.g. to linux cpu 0. Some tasks only run there, and interrupts tend to be favored to that cpu as well on x86.
Right, and I suspect all the big-little nonsense will have the little cores on low numbers as well (is this architected or can a creative licensee screw us over?)
So find_new_ilb() already does cpumask_first(), so it has a strong leftmost preference. We just need to make sure it indeed does the right thing and doesn't have some unintended side effect.