From 5307c9556bc17e3cd26d4e94fc3b2565921834de Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mike Galbraith Date: Tue, 8 May 2012 12:20:58 +0200 Subject: tick: Add tick skew boot option Let the user decide whether power consumption or jitter is the more important consideration for their machines. Quoting removal commit af5ab277ded04bd9bc6b048c5a2f0e7d70ef0867: "Historically, Linux has tried to make the regular timer tick on the various CPUs not happen at the same time, to avoid contention on xtime_lock. Nowadays, with the tickless kernel, this contention no longer happens since time keeping and updating are done differently. In addition, this skew is actually hurting power consumption in a measurable way on many-core systems." Problems: - Contrary to the above, systems do encounter contention on both xtime_lock and RCU structure locks when the tick is synchronized. - Moderate sized RT systems suffer intolerable jitter due to the tick being synchronized. - SGI reports the same for their large systems. - Fully utilized systems reap no power saving benefit from skew removal, but do suffer from resulting induced lock contention. - 0209f649 rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout This patch was born to combat lock contention which testing showed to have been _induced by_ skew removal. Skew the tick, contention disappeared virtually completely. Signed-off-by: Mike Galbraith Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1336472458.21924.78.camel@marge.simpson.net Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner --- Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation') diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt index b69cfdc12..ea38cd1 100644 --- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt +++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt @@ -2532,6 +2532,15 @@ bytes respectively. Such letter suffixes can also be entirely omitted. sched_debug [KNL] Enables verbose scheduler debug messages. + skew_tick= [KNL] Offset the periodic timer tick per cpu to mitigate + xtime_lock contention on larger systems, and/or RCU lock + contention on all systems with CONFIG_MAXSMP set. + Format: { "0" | "1" } + 0 -- disable. (may be 1 via CONFIG_CMDLINE="skew_tick=1" + 1 -- enable. + Note: increases power consumption, thus should only be + enabled if running jitter sensitive (HPC/RT) workloads. + security= [SECURITY] Choose a security module to enable at boot. If this boot parameter is not specified, only the first security module asking for security registration will be -- cgit v1.1