• Mike Galbraith's avatar
    tick: Add tick skew boot option · 5307c955
    Mike Galbraith authored
    Let the user decide whether power consumption or jitter is the
    more important consideration for their machines.
    
    Quoting removal commit af5ab277:
    
    "Historically, Linux has tried to make the regular timer tick on the
     various CPUs not happen at the same time, to avoid contention on
     xtime_lock.
        
     Nowadays, with the tickless kernel, this contention no longer happens
     since time keeping and updating are done differently. In addition,
     this skew is actually hurting power consumption in a measurable way on
     many-core systems."
    
    Problems:
    
    - Contrary to the above, systems do encounter contention on both
      xtime_lock and RCU structure locks when the tick is synchronized.
      
    - Moderate sized RT systems suffer intolerable jitter due to the tick
      being synchronized.
    
    - SGI reports the same for their large systems.
    
    - Fully utilized systems reap no power saving benefit from skew removal,
      but do suffer from resulting induced lock contention.
    
    - 0209f649 rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout
      This patch was born to combat lock contention which testing showed
      to have been _induced by_ skew removal.  Skew the tick, contention
      disappeared virtually completely.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Galbraith <mgalbraith@suse.de>
    Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1336472458.21924.78.camel@marge.simpson.netSigned-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
    5307c955
tick-sched.c 23.3 KB