tree 62205b755bca9391c6924764387d4417e91014d3
parent 394f2769aa0dbcf027bae6fb52835e25e05d332e
author Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org> 1340768757 -0700
committer Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> 1348411314 -0700

rcu: Control grace-period duration from sysfs

Although almost everyone is well-served by the defaults, some uses of RCU
benefit from shorter grace periods, while others benefit more from the
greater efficiency provided by longer grace periods.  Situations requiring
a large number of grace periods to elapse (and wireshark startup has
been called out as an example of this) are helped by lower-latency
grace periods.  Furthermore, in some embedded applications, people are
willing to accept a small degradation in update efficiency (due to there
being more of the shorter grace-period operations) in order to gain the
lower latency.

In contrast, those few systems with thousands of CPUs need longer grace
periods because the CPU overhead of a grace period rises roughly
linearly with the number of CPUs.  Such systems normally do not make
much use of facilities that require large numbers of grace periods to
elapse, so this is a good tradeoff.

Therefore, this commit allows the durations to be controlled from sysfs.
There are two sysfs parameters, one named "jiffies_till_first_fqs" that
specifies the delay in jiffies from the end of grace-period initialization
until the first attempt to force quiescent states, and the other named
"jiffies_till_next_fqs" that specifies the delay (again in jiffies)
between subsequent attempts to force quiescent states.  They both default
to three jiffies, which is compatible with the old hard-coded behavior.

At some future time, it may be possible to automatically increase the
grace-period length with the number of CPUs, but we do not yet have
sufficient data to do a good job.  Preliminary data indicates that we
should add an addiitonal jiffy to each of the delays for every 200 CPUs
in the system, but more experimentation is needed.  For now, the number
of systems with more than 1,000 CPUs is small enough that this can be
relegated to boot-time hand tuning.

Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Reviewed-by: Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>