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Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt')
| -rw-r--r-- | Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt | 30 |
1 files changed, 23 insertions, 7 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt b/Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt index 32351bfabf2..f3cd299fcc4 100644 --- a/Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt +++ b/Documentation/kernel-per-CPU-kthreads.txt @@ -162,7 +162,18 @@ Purpose: Execute workqueue requests To reduce its OS jitter, do any of the following: 1. Run your workload at a real-time priority, which will allow preempting the kworker daemons. -2. Do any of the following needed to avoid jitter that your +2. A given workqueue can be made visible in the sysfs filesystem + by passing the WQ_SYSFS to that workqueue's alloc_workqueue(). + Such a workqueue can be confined to a given subset of the + CPUs using the /sys/devices/virtual/workqueue/*/cpumask sysfs + files. The set of WQ_SYSFS workqueues can be displayed using + "ls sys/devices/virtual/workqueue". That said, the workqueues + maintainer would like to caution people against indiscriminately + sprinkling WQ_SYSFS across all the workqueues. The reason for + caution is that it is easy to add WQ_SYSFS, but because sysfs is + part of the formal user/kernel API, it can be nearly impossible + to remove it, even if its addition was a mistake. +3. Do any of the following needed to avoid jitter that your application cannot tolerate: a. Build your kernel with CONFIG_SLUB=y rather than CONFIG_SLAB=y, thus avoiding the slab allocator's periodic @@ -181,12 +192,17 @@ To reduce its OS jitter, do any of the following: make sure that this is safe on your particular system. d. It is not possible to entirely get rid of OS jitter from vmstat_update() on CONFIG_SMP=y systems, but you - can decrease its frequency by writing a large value to - /proc/sys/vm/stat_interval. The default value is HZ, - for an interval of one second. Of course, larger values - will make your virtual-memory statistics update more - slowly. Of course, you can also run your workload at - a real-time priority, thus preempting vmstat_update(). + can decrease its frequency by writing a large value + to /proc/sys/vm/stat_interval. The default value is + HZ, for an interval of one second. Of course, larger + values will make your virtual-memory statistics update + more slowly. Of course, you can also run your workload + at a real-time priority, thus preempting vmstat_update(), + but if your workload is CPU-bound, this is a bad idea. + However, there is an RFC patch from Christoph Lameter + (based on an earlier one from Gilad Ben-Yossef) that + reduces or even eliminates vmstat overhead for some + workloads at https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/9/4/379. e. If running on high-end powerpc servers, build with CONFIG_PPC_RTAS_DAEMON=n. This prevents the RTAS daemon from running on each CPU every second or so. |