Re: [PATCH V5 2/2] tracing, perf : add cpu hotplug trace events

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 21:47 +0100, Thomas Gleixner wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Feb 2011, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, 2011-02-24 at 15:24 -0500, Nicolas Pitre wrote:
> > 
> > > Most SMP ARM processors are going to use it soon.  Powering down idle 
> > > cores provides substantial power saving.
> > 
> > And why can't regular idle paths be used? CPU hotplug is a massively
> > expensive operation.
> 
> To achieve the same result from idle, you need to exclude the core
> from any unwanted wakeup. At the moment cpu unplug is the only way to
> achieve that.

Right, everything is a nail because all we have is a hammer like.

> If you want to do the same from idle, then we need the isolation
> features Frederic is working on for RT/HPC.
> 
> They allow us to isolate cores completely for totaly different
> reasons, but it could be resused to provide full isolation of a core
> in a very deep power state.

Exactly.

> That would solve the problem w/o going through kstompmachine

Right, kstopmachine is a large part of the problem, but cpu hotplug
really does an insane amount of work if all you want is to idle the
core.

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