Re: userspace irq balancer

Dave Hansen (haveblue@us.ibm.com)
19 May 2003 22:03:50 -0700


On Mon, 2003-05-19 at 20:46, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
> On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 08:25:31PM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> > The in-kernel stuff MUST go. It went in because "some benchmark went
> > faster", but with no "why" describing why it might have improved
> > performance. We KNOW it absolutely sucks for routing and firewall
> > applications. The in-kernel bits were all a shamans dance, with zero
> > technical "here is why this makes things go faster" description
> > attached. If I remember properly, the changelog message when the
> > in-kernel irq balancing went in was of the form "this makes some
> > specweb run go faster".
>
> Absolutely. Not to mention the code for the in-kernel algorithm has
> historically broken i386 ports using certain modes of Intel's
> interrupt controllers.

OK, I just went and actually looked at the code again. After
suppressing my gag reflex, I started to remember all of the problems
we've had with it, including fixing it for Intel's own clustered APIC
mode.

Does anyone have a patch to tear it out already? Is the current proc
interface acceptable, or do we want a syscall interface like wli
suggests?

-- 
Dave Hansen
haveblue@us.ibm.com

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