Re: [PATCH 2/2] x86: get more exact nr_irqs

From: Eric W. Biederman
Date: Mon Jan 04 2010 - 15:05:27 EST


"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On 01/04/2010 11:16 AM, Eric W. Biederman wrote:
>>
>> If we care about memory use efficiency let's replace irq_desc_ptrs
>> with a rbtree or a radix_tree. Something that moves the memory use
>> penalty onto those machines that have a lot of irqs.
>>
>
> rbtree doesn't make much sense for something that is addressed by index,
> and doesn't need to answer questions of the form "give me the highest
> member <= X". A hash table or radix tree makes sense, depending on the
> expected sparseness of the index.

Not counting irqs for msi's I think we are looking 36% to 25% fill. Maybe
a little lower. The sparseness is much higher if we count the number of
irqs that we might/use allocate as we do today.

Short of driver hotplug msis should be allocated densely, unless we start
reserving all possible 4K msi-x vectors.

For each ioapic we allocate 16 gsis, and only maybe four of them are
connected to actual pci slots.

This is essentially a slow path operation, so as long as we are not
too expensive we can use any data structure we want. In kernel hash
tables don't grow well so I don't think a hash table is a good choice,
and a hash table is essentially what we have now.

The truth is we don't know how many irqs we will have until msi
supporting drivers claim all of theirs.

I think a radix-tree would likely be the least intrusive choice as it
does not imply any changes to the data structure indexed.

Eric
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