Re: [RFD 4/9] Make total_forks per-cgroup

From: Glauber Costa
Date: Wed Sep 28 2011 - 11:29:57 EST


On 09/28/2011 09:42 AM, Martin Schwidefsky wrote:
On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 12:35:24 +0200
Peter Zijlstra<a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 2011-09-28 at 10:13 +0200, Martin Schwidefsky wrote:
On Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:37 +0200
Peter Zijlstra<a.p.zijlstra@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 2011-09-23 at 19:20 -0300, Glauber Costa wrote:
@@ -1039,6 +1035,8 @@ static void posix_cpu_timers_init(struct task_struct *tsk)
INIT_LIST_HEAD(&tsk->cpu_timers[2]);
}

+struct task_group *task_group(struct task_struct *p);

That doesn't appear to be actually used in this file..

Also, since there's already a for_each_possible_cpu() loop in that
proc/stat function, would it yield some code improvement to make
total_forks a cpu_usage_stat?

I guess the whole cputime64_t crap gets in the way of that being
natural...

We could of course kill off the cputime64_t thing, its pretty pointless
and its a u64 all over the board. I think Martin or Heiko created this
stuff (although I might be wrong, my git tree doesn't go back that far).

The reason to introduce cputime_t has been that different architecture
needed differently sized integers for their respective representation
of cputime. On x86-32 the number of ticks is recorded in a u32, on s390
we needed a u64 for the cpu timer values. cputime64_t is needed for
cpustat and other sums of cputime that would overflow a cputime_t
(in particular on x86-32 with the u32 cputime_t and the u64 cputime64_t).

Now we would convert everything to u64 but that would cause x86-32 to
use 64-bit arithmetic for the tick counter. If that is acceptable I
can't say.

Right, so the main point was about cputime64_t, we might as well use a
u64 for that throughout and ditch the silly cputime64_$op() accessors
and write normal code.

But even if cputime_t differs between 32 and 64 bit machines, there is
no reason actually use cputime_add(), C can do this.

The only reason to use things like cputime_add() is if you use a non
simple type, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

So I think we can simplify the code lots by doing away with cputime64_t
and all the cputime_*() functions. We can keep cputime_t, or we can use
unsigned long, which I think will end up doing pretty much the same.

That is, am I missing some added value of all this cputime*() foo?

C can do the math as long as the encoding of the cputime is simple enough.
Can we demand that a cputime value needs to be an integral type ?

What I did when I wrote all that stuff is to define cputime_t as a struct
that contains a single u64. That way I found all the places in the kernel
that used a cputime and could convert the code accordingly.

My fear is that if the cputime_xxx operations are removed, code will
sneak in again that just uses an unsigned long instead of a cputime_t.
That would break any arch that requires something bigger than a u32 for
its cputime. I really have to find my old debugging patch and see if we
already have bit rot in regard to cputime_t.

Martin,

Proposal is to keep cputime_t as is, and only get rid of its size-specific version. So I think we're safe as far as cputime_t is concerned.

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