lkml.org 
[lkml]   [2007]   [Nov]   [9]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
SubjectRe: conflict between tickless and perfmon2
From
Date
On Fri, 2007-11-09 at 02:44 -0800, Stephane Eranian wrote:
> Hello,
>
> We have identified a conflict between TICKLESS (CONFIG_NO_HZ) and
> the current perfmon2 implementation. The problem impacts system-wide
> sessions using timeout-based event set multiplexing.
>
> Event set multiplexing allows monitoring tools to measure more events
> than there are actual performance counters on the processor. Events
> are grouped in sets which are then multiplexed onto the actual counters.
> Switching can be triggered either by a timeout or by a counter overflow.
> This is supported for per-thread and system-wide sessions.
>
> For timeout-based switching, the duration expressed in nanoseconds is
> meant to represent wall-clock time in system-wide mode, and execution
> time in per-thread mode. Granularity is limited by HZ.
>
> The current implementation for timeout is a simple hook on the timer
> interrupt path in apic_*.c:smp_local_timer_interrupt(). Unfortunately,
> this does not work when tickless is enabled: we get much less set
> switches than expected on an idle system.
>
> It looks like a solution would be to change the implementation of
> timeout-based switching to use HR timers instead. Similar to what is
> done for ITIMER_REAL and ITIMER_VIRTUAL.
>
> Unless someone has a better proposal, I will experiment with this on
> 2.6.24-rc2.

Might help if you CC the tickless folks :-)

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2007-11-09 12:11    [W:0.137 / U:0.092 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site