Re: [PATCH 02/13] irq: Introduce IRQD_AFFINITY_MANAGED flag

From: Bart Van Assche
Date: Thu Jun 16 2016 - 11:39:29 EST


On 06/16/2016 05:20 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
On Wed, Jun 15, 2016 at 09:36:54PM +0200, Bart Van Assche wrote:
Do you agree that - ignoring other interrupt assignments - that the latter
interrupt assignment scheme would result in higher throughput and lower
interrupt processing latency?

Probably. Once we've got it in the core IRQ code we can tweak the
algorithm to be optimal.

Sorry but I'm afraid that we are embedding policy in the kernel, something we should not do. I know that there are workloads for which dedicating some CPU cores to interrupt processing and other CPU cores to running kernel threads improves throughput, probably because this results in less cache eviction on the CPU cores that run kernel threads and some degree of interrupt coalescing on the CPU cores that process interrupts. My concern is that I doubt that there is an interrupt assignment scheme that works optimally for all workloads. Hence my request to preserve the ability to modify interrupt affinity from user space.

Bart.