Re: 2.6.19-rc5: known regressions

From: Adrian Bunk
Date: Wed Nov 08 2006 - 11:22:19 EST


On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 07:47:07AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, 8 Nov 2006, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
> >
> > I haven't seen anyone reproduce this but Tim Chen, and Tim wasn't
> > able to root cause the problem so I believe we are going to have
> > this regression :(
>
> Note that you really shouldn't look too closely at lmbench scheduling
> fluctuations. They can fluctuate a _lot_, especially under SMP, and it can
> depend on things like cache layout that has nothing to do with the
> scheduler (ie just code movement can make the lmbench numbers change).
>
> So there are "regressions" and there are "shit happens". It can sometimes
> be hard to tell the two apart, of course ;)

There's perhaps one thing that might help us to see whether it's just a
benchmark effekt or a real problem:

With Tim's CONFIG_NR_CPUS=8, NR_IRQS only increases from 224 in 2.6.18
to 512 in 2.6.19-rc.

With CONFIG_NR_CPUS=255, NR_IRQS increases from 224 in 2.6.18
to 8416 in 2.6.19-rc.

@Tim:
Can you try CONFIG_NR_CPUS=255 with both 2.6.18 and 2.6.19-rc5?

> Linus

cu
Adrian

--

"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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