linux-kernel - Re: [RFC][PATCH 04/10] sched: Change pick_next_task

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Date:	Mon, 06 Dec 2010 21:59:28 -0500
From:	Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org>
To:	Gregory Haskins <ghaskins@...ell.com>
Cc:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@...llo.nl>,
	Ingo Molnar <mingo@...e.hu>,
	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>
Subject: Re: [RFC][PATCH 04/10] sched: Change pick_next_task_rt from
 unlikely to likely

On Mon, 2010-12-06 at 19:46 -0700, Gregory Haskins wrote:
> >>> On 12/6/2010 at 08:58 PM, in message <20101207021329.185936860@...dmis.org>,
> Steven Rostedt <rostedt@...dmis.org> wrote: 
> > From: Steven Rostedt <srostedt@...hat.com>
> > 
> > The if (unlikely(!rt_rq->rt_nr_running)) test in pick_next_task_rt()
> > tests if there is another rt task ready to run. If so, then pick it.
> > 
> > In most systems, only one RT task runs at a time most of the time.
> > Running the branch unlikely annotator profiler on a system doing average
> > work "running firefox, evolution, xchat, distcc builds, etc", it showed the
> > following:
> 
> My feeling is that generally speaking, if the branch is workload
> dependent, we should probably not annotate it at all and let the CPUs
> branch-predictor do its thing.  I guess what I am not 100% clear on is
> how these annotations affect the BPU.  I.e. is it a static decision
> point or can the BPU still "learn" if the annotation is particularly
> wrong for a given workload?  For the former, I think we should just
> remove this particular annotation (and there are others that need
> review).  For the latter, this is obviously the right annotation we
> should be using in this particular case.

I'm fine with just removing the likely() here. It is a bit workload
dependent. We can't assume that we are running a lot of RT tasks on a
single CPU, but we also should not assume that we are not doing so.
Considering that we are just coming out of an RT task, I doubt it will
hurt anything to just keep the annotation off.

I don't think gcc does anything special for x86 with regards to the BPU.
But I do believe that gcc will add special ops for likely()'s on other
archs.

-- Steve


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