Re: [PATCH tip/core/rcu 02/11] rcu: Expedite during suspend andresume only on smallish systems

[Paul E. McKenney]

On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 08:18:32PM -0700, Josh Triplett wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 17, 2013 at 06:37:47PM -0700, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> > From: "Paul E. McKenney" <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> > 
> > Expedited grace periods are of dubious benefit on very large systems,
> > so this commit restricts their automated use during suspend and resume
> > to systems of 256 or fewer CPUs.
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> 
> This seems odd.  If expedited grace periods don't help on large systems,
> shouldn't you just compile them out entirely and ignore rcu_expedited,
> rather than just in this one special case?

Longer term, a bunch of stuff will need optimization for larger systems.
Expedited RCU grace periods, rcu_barrier(), possibly even grace-period
initialization and cleanup.  Also smp_call_function(), along with other
primitives that have broadcast semantics.  These changes would allow
this hack to be removed.

The most straightforward approach would be to provision helper kthreads,
increasing the number of helper kthreads with the number of CPUs.  But
I would like to see actual problems due to the lack of scalability before
adding more complexity to RCU.  ;-)

> In any case, if this patch still makes sense, please squash it into the
> previous one.

Fair enough, done!

							Thanx, Paul

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