Re: 2.6.15-ck1

[Vojtech Pavlik <vojtech@suse.cz>]

On Thu, Jan 05, 2006 at 02:22:37AM +0100, Andi Kleen wrote:
> Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org> writes:
> 
> 
> > sounds like we need some sort of profiler or benchmarker or at least a
> > tool that helps finding out which timers are regularly firing, with the
> > aim at either grouping them or trying to reduce their disturbance in
> > some form.
> 
> I did one some time ago for my own noidletick patch. Can probably dig
> it out again. It just profiled which timers interrupted idle.
> 
> Executive summary for my laptop: worst was the keyboard driver (it ran
> some polling driver to work around some hardware bug, but fired very
> often) , followed by the KDE desktop (should be mostly
> fixed now, I complained) and the X server and some random kernel 
> drivers.
> 
> I haven't checked recently if keyboard has been fixed by now.

It's not. At this moment it's impossible to remove without significant
surgery to the driver, because it'd prevent hotplugging and many KVMs
from working.

I can rather easily make the timer frequency variable. Would be 1 second
idle ticks OK? 

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs, SuSE CR