linux-kernel - Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Pre-emption control for userspace

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Date:	Wed, 05 Mar 2014 12:58:29 -0700
From:	Khalid Aziz <khalid.aziz@...cle.com>
To:	Peter Zijlstra <peterz@...radead.org>,
	Andi Kleen <andi@...stfloor.org>
CC:	Thomas Gleixner <tglx@...utronix.de>,
	One Thousand Gnomes <gnomes@...rguk.ukuu.org.uk>,
	"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@...or.com>, Ingo Molnar <mingo@...nel.org>,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, viro@...iv.linux.org.uk,
	oleg@...hat.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [RFC] [PATCH] Pre-emption control for userspace

On 03/05/2014 04:10 AM, Peter Zijlstra wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 04:51:15PM -0800, Andi Kleen wrote:
>> Anything else?
>
> Proxy execution; its a form of PI that works for arbitrary scheduling
> policies (thus also very much including fair).
>
> With that what you effectively end up with is the lock holder running
> 'boosted' by the runtime of its blocked chain until the entire chain
> runs out of time, at which point preemption doesn't matter anyhow.
>

Hello Peter,

I read through the concept of proxy execution and it is a very 
interesting concept. I come from many years of realtime and embeddded 
systems development and I can easily recall various problems in the past 
that can be solved or helped by this. Looking at the current problem I 
am trying to solve with databases and JVM, I run into the same issue I 
described in my earlier email. Proxy execution is a post-contention 
solution. By the time proxy execution can do something for my case, I 
have already paid the price of contention and a context switch which is 
what I am trying to avoid. For a critical section that is very short 
compared to the size of execution thread, which is the case I am looking 
at, avoiding preemption in the middle of that short critical section 
helps much more than dealing with lock contention later on. The goal 
here is to avoid lock contention and associated cost. I do understand 
the cost of dealing with lock contention poorly and that can easily be 
much bigger cost, but I am looking into avoiding even getting there.

Thanks,
Khalid
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