Re: [patch 1/2] add ALL_CPUS option to stop_machine_run()

From: Max Krasnyanskiy
Date: Fri Feb 29 2008 - 14:58:21 EST


Ingo Molnar wrote:
* Max Krasnyanskiy <maxk@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

btw Being an RT guy you do not think that stop machine is evil ? [...]

i'm not "an RT guy", -rt is just one of the many projects i've been involved with.

and no, i dont think stop machine is "evil" - it's currently the best way to do certain things. If you can solve it better then sure, i'm awaiting your patches - but the only patch i saw from you so far was the one that turned off stop-machine for isolated cpus - which was incredibly broken and ignored the problem altogether.
Ingo, I got it. My patch was a hack. Moving on. Seriously there is no need to say it ten thousand times ;-).

You clipped the part where I elaborated what exactly is evil about the stop machine. I clearly said that yes for some things there is just no other way but in general we should _try_ to avoid it. Note that I did not say "we must" I'm saying we should try.

Right now the answer is: "if you want to do hard RT then avoid doing things like loading modules". (which you should avoid while doing hard-RT anyway)
That's just not practical. Sure you can have some kind of stripped down machine but then you loose a lot of flexibility. Again "should" is the keyword here. For a lot of workloads hard-RT has to coexist with a bunch of other things.

Max

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