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These RCU waits were set to use interruptible waits to avoid the kthreads contributing to system load average, even though they are not interruptible as they are spawned from a kthread. Use the new TASK_IDLE swaits which makes our goal clear, and removes confusion about these paths possibly being interruptible -- they are not. When the system is idle the RCU grace-period kthread will spend all its time blocked inside the swait_event_interruptible(). If the interruptible() was not used, then this kthread would contribute to the load average. This means that an idle system would have a load average of 2 (or 3 if PREEMPT=y), rather than the load average of 0 that almost fifty years of UNIX has conditioned sysadmins to expect. The same argument applies to swait_event_interruptible_timeout() use. The RCU grace-period kthread spends its time blocked inside this call while waiting for grace periods to complete. In particular, if there was only one busy CPU, but that CPU was frequently invoking call_rcu(), then the RCU grace-period kthread would spend almost all its time blocked inside the swait_event_interruptible_timeout(). This would mean that the load average would be 2 rather than the expected 1 for the single busy CPU. Acked-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com> Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.