Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:15:39 -0700 | From | Andrew Morton <> | Subject | Re: Overview of concurrency managed workqueue |
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On Wed, 16 Jun 2010 18:55:05 +0200 Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org> wrote:
> It was about using wq for cpu intensive / RT stuff. Linus said, > > So stop arguing about irrelevancies. Nobody uses workqueues for RT > or for CPU-intensive crap. It's not what they were designed for, or > used for.
kernel/padata.c uses workqueues for cpu-intensive work, as I understand it.
I share Daniel's concerns here. Being able to set a worker thread's priority or policy isn't a crazy thing. Also one might want to specify that a work item be executed on one of a node's CPUs, or within a cpuset's CPUs, maybe other stuff. I have vague feelings that there's already code in the kernel somewhere which does some of these things.
(Please remind me what your patches did about create_rt_workqueue and stop_machine?)
(Please note that drivers/media/video/ivtv/ivtv-irq.c is currently running sched_setscheduler() against a workqueue thread of its own creation, so we have precedent).
If someone wants realtime service for a work item then at present, the way to do that is to create your own kernel threads, set their policy and start feeding them work items. That sounds like a sensible requirement and implementation to me. But how does it translate into the new implementation?
The priority/policy logically attaches to the work itself, not to the thread which serves it. So one would want to be able to provide that info at queue_work()-time. Could the workqueue core then find a thread, set its policy/priority, schedule it and then let the CPU scheduler do its usual thing with it?
That doesn't sound too bad? Add policy/priority/etc fields to the work_struct?
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