Re: [RFC 0/4] Using HPET in MSI mode and setting up per CPU HPETtimers

From: Ingo Molnar
Date: Sat Sep 06 2008 - 08:43:16 EST



* venkatesh.pallipadi@xxxxxxxxx <venkatesh.pallipadi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Patchset that uses HPET timers in MSI mode (when supported) and sets
> up per CPU HPET timers. This removes the dependency on IRQ0 timer
> broadcast with LAPIC stopping in deep C-state, on platforms that
> support HPET MSI mode.
>
> On my test system with dual core CPU, the number of timer related
> interrupts (HPET_MSI + IRQ0 + LAPIC) comes down from 180 to 95 over a
> period of 10s, with these patches. This is on an idle system with
> tickless enabled and when system is idle.
>
> Patches against tip.

cool stuff!

this is _really_ how a modern dynticks system should look like on x86 -
proper per CPU hardware timers that are southbridge based.

There's a few routine checks this new has to pass: we've got to see how
widely this works and whether there are any bugs/quirks to take care of,
so i created a separate feature topic for it: tip/timers/hpet-percpu.

This tip/timers/hpet-percpu feature topic tree is based on irq/sparseirq
+ timers/hpet + timers/urgent - which had some changes in the hpet area.
I merged up the conflicts - please double check the result. I also did
cleanups for a few style problems that were present in hpet.c.

I've merged it into tip/master as well and will run a few tests before
pushing it out.

Ingo
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