• Ingo Molnar's avatar
    [PATCH] Workqueue Abstraction · 6ed12ff8
    Ingo Molnar authored
    This is the next iteration of the workqueue abstraction.
    
    The framework includes:
    
     - per-CPU queueing support.
    
    on SMP there is a per-CPU worker thread (bound to its CPU) and per-CPU
    work queues - this feature is completely transparent to workqueue-users.
    keventd automatically uses this feature. XFS can now update to work-queues
    and have the same per-CPU performance as it had with its per-CPU worker
    threads.
    
     - delayed work submission
    
    there's a new queue_delayed_work(wq, work, delay) function and a new
    schedule_delayed_work(work, delay) function. The later one is used to
    correctly fix former tq_timer users. I've reverted those changes in 2.5.40
    that changed tq_timer uses to schedule_work() - eg. in the case of
    random.c or the tty flip queue it was definitely the wrong thing to do.
    
    delayed work means a timer embedded in struct work_struct.  I considered
    using split struct work_struct and delayed_work_struct types, but lots
    of code actively uses task-queues in both delayed and non-delayed mode,
    so i went for the more generic approach that allows both methods of work
    submission.  Delayed timers do not cause any other overhead in the
    normal submission path otherwise.
    
     - multithreaded run_workqueue() implementation
    
    the run_workqueue() function can now be called from multiple contexts, and
    a worker thread will only use up a single entryy - this property is used
    by the flushing code, and can potentially be used in the future to extend
    the number of per-CPU worker threads.
    
     - more reliable flushing
    
    there's now a 'pending work' counter, which is used to accurately detect
    when the last work-function has finished execution. It's also used to
    correctly flush against timed requests. I'm not convinced whether the old
    keventd implementation got this detail right.
    
     - i switched the arguments of the queueing function(s) per Jeff's
       suggestion, it's more straightforward this way.
    
    
    Driver fixes:
    
    i have converted almost every affected driver to the new framework. This
    cleaned up tons of code. I also fixed a number of drivers that were still
    using BHs (these drivers did not compile in 2.5.40).
    
    while this means lots of changes, it might ease the QA decision whether to
    put this patch into 2.5.
    
    The pach converts roughly 80% of all tqueue-using code to workqueues - and
    all the places that are not converted to workqueues yet are places that do
    not compile in vanilla 2.5.40 anyway, due to unrelated changes. I've
    converted a fair number of drivers that do not compile in 2.5.40, and i
    think i've managed to convert every driver that compiles under 2.5.40.
    6ed12ff8
journal.c 112 KB