Hi Peter,
2014-02-22 20:31 GMT+08:00 Peter Hurley <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
The user-settable knob, low_latency, has been the source of
several BUG reports which stem from flush_to_ldisc() running
in interrupt context. Since 3.12, which added several sleeping
locks (termios_rwsem and buf->lock) to the input processing path,
the frequency of these BUG reports has increased.
Note that changes in 3.12 did not introduce this regression;
sleeping locks were first added to the input processing path
with the removal of the BKL from N_TTY in commit
a88a69c91256418c5907c2f1f8a0ec0a36f9e6cc,
'n_tty: Fix loss of echoed characters and remove bkl from n_tty'
and later in commit 38db89799bdf11625a831c5af33938dcb11908b6,
'tty: throttling race fix'. Since those changes, executing
flush_to_ldisc() in interrupt_context (ie, low_latency set), is unsafe.
However, since most devices do not validate if the low_latency
setting is appropriate for the context (process or interrupt) in
which they receive data, some reports are due to misconfiguration.
Further, serial dma devices for which dma fails, resort to
interrupt receiving as a backup without resetting low_latency.
Historically, low_latency was used to force wake-up the reading
process rather than wait for the next scheduler tick. The
effect was to trim multiple milliseconds of latency from
when the process would receive new data.
Recent tests [1] have shown that the reading process now receives
data with only 10's of microseconds latency without low_latency set.
The 10's of miscroseconds is ok for 115200 bps like device, but it may
hurt the high speed device like Bluetooth which runs at 3M/4M bps or
higher.
More and more smartphones are using uart as the Bluetooth data
interface due to its low-pin, low-power feature, and many of them
are using HZ=100 kernel, I'm afraid this added delay may cause
some problem.