Re: [RFC PATCH] workqueue: Automatic affinity scope fallback for single-pod topologies

[Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>]

Hello,

On Tue, Feb 03, 2026 at 03:34:22PM -0500, Chuck Lever wrote:
> The patch addresses that, I'd hope, by only switching to per-CPU on
> single pod (ie, simple) systems. Larger, more complicated, topologies
> should be left unchanged. I imagine that on a single pod machine with a
> large number of cores, having per-CPU locking will nearly always be a
> win.

Oh, I mean, unfortunately, intel produces chips with a lot of CPUs on a
single L3 cache. e.g. Recent intel chips have upto 128 cores per socket and
each socket still presents as a single L3 cache domain, so falling back to
AFFN_SMT would mean that all unbound workqueues by default would be backed
by 128 pools per socket. Create some hundreds of threads per pool and then
now you end up with hundreds of thousands of kworkers.

Thanks.

-- 
tejun