responsiveness: newer kernels causing lagging and blocking

[Stephan BÃrwolf]

Under various conditions linux since 2.6.39-rc1 laggs and blocks enormously the whole system.
(For example while starting "winecfg" (on a thinkpad X220) and parallel moving the
mousecursor you can observe a periodic blocking for some seconds)

After bisecting a little while, commit "4819d2e4310796c4e9eef674499af9b9caf36b5a"
(" drm: Retry i2c transfer of EDID block after failure ") seems to be responsible.

Because function "drm_do_probe_ddc_edid" loops trying "i2c_transfer" it consumes a lot
of time during errors. Reverting or changing "retries" from 5 to 1 extremly minimizes the
problem to "not perceptible".
It seems the locking within "i2c_transfer" slows everything down.
So maybe it is possible to yield() before calling it?


regards Stephan
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/