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  • Nadav Har'El's avatar
    vhost: don't forget to schedule() · d550dda1
    Nadav Har'El authored
    
    
    This is a tiny, but important, patch to vhost.
    
    Vhost's worker thread only called schedule() when it had no work to do, and
    it wanted to go to sleep. But if there's always work to do, e.g., the guest
    is running a network-intensive program like netperf with small message sizes,
    schedule() was *never* called. This had several negative implications (on
    non-preemptive kernels):
    
     1. Passing time was not properly accounted to the "vhost" process (ps and
        top would wrongly show it using zero CPU time).
    
     2. Sometimes error messages about RCU timeouts would be printed, if the
        core running the vhost thread didn't schedule() for a very long time.
    
     3. Worst of all, a vhost thread would "hog" the core. If several vhost
        threads need to share the same core, typically one would get most of the
        CPU time (and its associated guest most of the performance), while the
        others hardly get any work done.
    
    The trivial solution is to add
    
    	if (need_resched())
    		schedule();
    
    After doing every piece of work. This will not do the heavy schedule() all
    the time, just when the timer interrupt decided a reschedule is warranted
    (so need_resched returns true).
    
    Thanks to Abel Gordon for this patch.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarNadav Har'El <nyh@il.ibm.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMichael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>
    d550dda1