On Thu, 21 Feb 2002, Erich Focht wrote:
> well I whished this kind of feedback came at my first attempt to have
> a discussion on this subject. Would have saved me lots of reboots :-)
i did not find out about the most fundamental problem until today, when i
tried to merge your patch. Much of Linux's development is trial & err, i
do that all the time as well.
> The reaction those days was:
>
> Ingo> your patch does not solve the problem, the situation is more
> Ingo> complex. What happens if the target task is not 'current' and is
> Ingo> running on some other CPU? If we send the migration interrupt then
> Ingo> nothing guarantees that the task will reschedule anytime soon, so
> Ingo> the target CPU will keep spinning indefinitely. There are other
> Ingo> problems too, like crossing calls to set_cpus_allowed(), etc. Right
> Ingo> now set_cpus_allowed() can only be used for
> Ingo> the current task, and must be used by kernel code that knows what it
> Ingo> does.
>
> and later:
>
> Ingo> well, there is a way, by fixing the current mechanizm. But since
> Ingo> nothing uses it currently it wont get much testing. I only pointed
> Ingo> out that the patch does not solve some of the races.
>
> So I kept Ingo's design idea of sending IPIs. And I made it survive
> crossing calls and avoid spinning around for long time, specially in
> interrupt.
the fundamental problem is with wait_task_inactive() called from IRQ
contexts - it can spin indefinitely. The above comments list some of the
other problems, and those can indeed be solved by extending the IPI
delivery mechanism, which you did.
migration threads are a variation of the current scheduler as well -the
schedule()/wakeup() hotpath did not have to be touched.
Ingo
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sat Feb 23 2002 - 21:00:33 EST