smpboot: allow excluding cpus from the smpboot threads

This patch series allows the watchdog to run by default only on the
housekeeping cores when nohz_full is in effect; this seems to be a good
compromise short of turning it off completely (since the nohz_full cores
can't tolerate a watchdog).

To provide customizability, we add /proc/sys/kernel/watchdog_cpumask so
that the set of cores running the watchdog can be tuned to different
values after bootup.

To implement this customizability, we add a new
smpboot_update_cpumask_percpu_thread() API to the smpboot_thread
subsystem that lets us park or unpark "unwanted" threads.

And now that threads can be parked for long periods of time, we tweak the
/proc/<pid>/stat and /proc/<pid>/status code so parked threads aren't
reported as running, which is otherwise confusing.

This patch (of 3):

This change allows some cores to be excluded from running the
smp_hotplug_thread tasks.  The following commit to update
kernel/watchdog.c to use this functionality is the motivating example, and
more information on the motivation is provided there.

A new smp_hotplug_thread field is introduced, "cpumask", which is cpumask
field managed by the smpboot subsystem that indicates whether or not the
given smp_hotplug_thread should run on that core; the cpumask is checked
when deciding whether to unpark the thread.

To limit the cpumask to less than cpu_possible, you must call
smpboot_update_cpumask_percpu_thread() after registering.

Signed-off-by: Chris Metcalf <cmetcalf@ezchip.com>
Cc: Don Zickus <dzickus@redhat.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Ulrich Obergfell <uobergfe@redhat.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2 files changed