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 <mgalbraith@suse.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1336472458.21924.78.camel@marge.simpson.net
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
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 @@
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