tick: Add tick skew boot option

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Let the user decide whether power consumption or jitter is the
more important consideration for their machines.

Quoting removal commit af5ab277de:

"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>

...

This commit is contained in:

Mike Galbraith 2012-05-08 12:20:58 +02:00 • committed by Thomas Gleixner

parent ce004178be

commit 5307c9556b

2 changed files with 27 additions and 0 deletions

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9

Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt

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18

kernel/time/tick-sched.c

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