Re: [Ksummit-2008-discuss] Delayed interrupt work, thread pools

[Arjan van de Ven]

Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> Here's something that's been running in the back of my mind for some
> time that could be a good topic of discussion at KS.
>
> In various areas (I'll come up with some examples later), kernel code
> such as drivers want to defer some processing to "task level", for
> various reasons such as locking (taking mutexes), memory allocation,
> interrupt latency, or simply doing things that may take more time than
> is reasonable to do at interrupt time or do things that may block.
>
> Currently, the main mechanism we provide to do that is workqueues. They
> somewhat solve the problem, but at the same time, somewhat can make it
> worse.
>
> The problem is that delaying a potentially long/sleeping task to a work
> queue will have the effect of delaying everything else waiting on that
> work queue.

how much of this would be obsoleted if we had irqthreads ?
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