Re: [PATCH v2 3/4] kthread: NUMA aware kthread_create_on_cpu()

[Eric Dumazet]

Le jeudi 09 dÃcembre 2010 Ã 16:44 -0800, Andrew Morton a Ãcrit :

> The name "kthread_create_on_cpu" is pretty misleading.
> 
> One would expect such a function to create a kthread which is bound to
> that CPU.  But what it in fact does is to create a kthread which is
> bound to all CPUs and whose stack, task_struct and thread_info were
> allocated from the node which contains `cpu'.
> 
> Also, a saner interface would be one which takes the numa_node_id, not
> the cpu number.
> 


> >
> > ...
> >
> >  /**
> > - * kthread_create - create a kthread.
> > + * kthread_create_on_cpu - create a kthread.
> >   * @threadfn: the function to run until signal_pending(current).
> >   * @data: data ptr for @threadfn.
> > + * @cpu: cpu number.
> >   * @namefmt: printf-style name for the thread.
> >   *
> >   * Description: This helper function creates and names a kernel
> >   * thread.  The thread will be stopped: use wake_up_process() to start
> >   * it.  See also kthread_run().
> >   *
> > + * If thread is going to be bound on a particular cpu, give its number
> > + * in @cpu, to get NUMA affinity for kthread stack, or else give -1.
> 
> This is a bit presumptuous.  The caller might wish to later bind this
> thread to some or all of the CPUs on the node, rather than to a single
> CPU (eg, kswapd()).
> 
> 
> So what to do?  Maybe add a new kthread_create_node() which prepares a
> kthread whose memory is bound to that node, then add a
> kthread_create_cpu() convenience wrapper around that?
> 

We probably can add the "bind to cpu" as a fifth patch, to avoid one 
kthread_bind(p, cpu);  done by these callers.

My reasoning not including this kthread_bind(p, cpu) in initial patch
series that I was focusing on NUMA properties first, not on scheduling
(this part already runs correctly as far as I know)

Thanks for taking the patch series, I was about to resubmit it today :)



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