Re: [PATCH] sky2: Use deferrable timer for watchdog

On Dec 20, 2007 12:51 PM, Stephen Hemminger
[off-list ref] wrote:

Quit top-posting!

If this is the case then the whole usage of round_jiffies() is bogus. All users of round_jiffies()
should just be converted to deferrable??  I am a bit concerned that if deferrable gets used everywhere
then a strange situation would occur where all timers were waiting for some other timer to finally
happen, kind of a wierd timelock situation. Like the old chip/dale cartoon:
 "you first, no you first, after you mister chip, no after you mister dale,..."

Haha - I thought about this too. I think there should be mechanism
where the machine does not idle infinitely even if there are no
non-deferrable timers. Something like an affordable QoS for non
deferrable timers - the kernel wakes up after that interval and runs
all deferrable timers  even if nothing non-deferrable is set to run.
So we still get advantage of not having to wake individually for each
timer and the non-deferrable timers do get all run in reasonable
amount of time.

Who knows Thomas/Ingo already built in something of that nature or effect?!

Parag