[PATCH] powerpc: mitigate impact of decrementer reset

[Michael Ellerman]

On Mon, 2014-11-17 at 11:18 -0800, Paul E. McKenney wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 01:42:12PM +1100, Michael Ellerman wrote:
> > On Mon, 2014-11-10 at 14:58 -0600, Paul Clarke wrote:
> > > On 11/10/2014 04:08 AM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 2014-10-07 at 14:13 -0500, Paul Clarke wrote:
> > > >> This patch short-circuits the reset of the decrementer, exiting after
> > > >> the decrementer reset, but before the housekeeping tasks if the only
> > > >> need for the interrupt is simply to reset it.  After this patch,
> > > >> the latency spike was measured at about 150 nanoseconds.
> > > >
> > > > Doesn't this break the irq_work stuff ? We trigger it with a set_dec(1);
> > > > and your patch will probably cause it to be skipped...
> > > 
> > > You're right.
> > 
> > Yeah, thanks Ben, that would have been bad.
> > 
> > So we'll need to come up with a different approach.
> 
> If I am understanding this correctly, it underscores the need for more
> bits in the decrementer register.  :-/

Yes that is the root cause of the problem :)

cheers