Re: [RFC PATCH] arm: imx: Workaround i.MX6 PMU interrupts muxed to one SPI

[Russell King - ARM Linux <linux@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 02:24:43PM +0000, Daniel Thompson wrote:
> On 20/11/14 11:52, Lucas Stach wrote:
> > I've sent almost the same patch a while ago. At this time it was shot
> > down due to fears of the measurements being too flaky to be useful with
> > all that IRQ dance. While I don't think this is true (I did some
> > measurements on a SOLO and a QUAD variants of the i.MX6 with the same
> > workload, that were only minimally apart), I believe the IRQ affinity
> > dance isn't the best way to handle this.
> 
> Cumulative statistics and time based sampling profilers should be fine
> either way since a delay before the interrupt the asserted on the
> affected core should have a low impact here.

One thing you're missing is that the interrupt latency for this can be
horrific.

Firstly, remember that Linux processes one interrupt (per core) at a time.
What this means is that if we have two cores running interrupts (eg, CPU 2
and CPU 3), and we raise a PMU interrupt on CPU 1 which is supposed to be
for CPU 0, then we'll process the interrupt on CPU 1, and forward it to
CPU 2.  CPU 2 will then have it pending, but has to wait for the interrupt
handler to complete before it can service it, where upon it forwards it to
CPU 3.  CPU 3 then goes through the same before forwarding it to CPU 0.

I also wonder how this works when you use perf record -a (from all CPUs.)
If the sampling rate is high enough, will the interrupt be forwarded to
the other CPUs?  Has perf record -a been tested?

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