[linux-audio-dev] Re: [announce] [patch] Voluntary Kernel Preemption Patch

[Ingo Molnar]

* Andrew Morton <akpm at osdl.org> wrote:

> None of these approaches improves worst-case latency at all on SMP. 
> If we're not going to address the SMP problem we could just make it
> UP-only, in which case increased locking costs are a non-issue.
> 
> I'd prefer that we find a solution for SMP too though.

i have solved the fundamental SMP latency problems in the -Q7 patch, by
redesigning how SMP preemption is done. Here's the relevant changelog
entry:

[...]

the main change in this patch are more SMP latency fixes. The stock
kernel, even with CONFIG_PREEMPT enabled, didnt have any spin-nicely
preemption logic for the following, commonly used SMP locking
primitives: read_lock(), spin_lock_irqsave(), spin_lock_irq(),
spin_lock_bh(), read_lock_irqsave(), read_lock_irq(), read_lock_bh(),
write_lock_irqsave(), write_lock_irq(), write_lock_bh(). Only
spin_lock() and write_lock() [the two simplest cases] where covered.

In addition to the preemption latency problems, the _irq() variants in
the above list didnt do any IRQ-enabling while spinning - possibly
resulting in excessive irqs-off sections of code!

-Q7 fixes all of these latency problems: we now re-enable interrupts
while spinning in all possible cases, and a spinning op stays
preemptible if this is a beginning of a new critical section.

[...]

feedback from Mark H Johnson:

 http://lkml.org/lkml/2004/8/30/202

the latest patch is:

  http://redhat.com/~mingo/voluntary-preempt/voluntary-preempt-2.6.9-rc1-bk4-R0

i'm already in the process of cleaning up the patch and making it ready
for splitup & merge. The spinlock fixes will be amongst the first
patches i'll send you.

	Ingo