Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] cpuhotplug/nohz: Remove offline cpus from nohz-idle state

From: Srivatsa Vaddagiri <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 7 Jan 2013 20:27:50 -0800

* Russell King - ARM Linux <[email-masked]> [2013-01-05 10:36:27]:

> On Thu, Jan 03, 2013 at 06:58:38PM -0800, Srivatsa Vaddagiri wrote:
> > I also think that the
> > wait_for_completion() based wait in ARM's __cpu_die() can be replaced with a
> > busy-loop based one, as the wait there in general should be terminated within
> > few cycles.
> 
> Why open-code this stuff when we have infrastructure already in the kernel
> for waiting for stuff to happen?  I chose to use the standard infrastructure
> because its better tested, and avoids having to think about whether we need
> CPU barriers and such like to ensure that updates are seen in a timely
> manner.

I was primarily thinking of calling as few generic functions as possible on
a dead cpu. I recall several "am I running on a dead cpu?" checks
(cpu_is_offline(this_cpu) that were put in generic routines during early
versions of cpu hotplug [1] to educate code running on dead cpu, the need for
which went away though with introduction of atomic/stop-machine variant. The
need to add a RCU_NONIDLE() wrapper around ARM's cpu_die() [2] is perhaps a more
recent example of educating code running on dead cpu. As quickly we die as
possible after idle thread of dying cpu gains control, the better!

1. http://lwn.net/Articles/69040/
2. http://lists.infradead.org/pipermail/linux-arm-kernel/2012-July/107971.html

- vatsa
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