Skip to content
Commit 1fb497dd authored by Thomas Gleixner's avatar Thomas Gleixner Committed by Ingo Molnar
Browse files

posix-cpu-timers: Provide mechanisms to defer timer handling to task_work



Running posix CPU timers in hard interrupt context has a few downsides:

 - For PREEMPT_RT it cannot work as the expiry code needs to take
   sighand lock, which is a 'sleeping spinlock' in RT. The original RT
   approach of offloading the posix CPU timer handling into a high
   priority thread was clumsy and provided no real benefit in general.

 - For fine grained accounting it's just wrong to run this in context of
   the timer interrupt because that way a process specific CPU time is
   accounted to the timer interrupt.

 - Long running timer interrupts caused by a large amount of expiring
   timers which can be created and armed by unpriviledged user space.

There is no hard requirement to expire them in interrupt context.

If the signal is targeted at the task itself then it won't be delivered
before the task returns to user space anyway. If the signal is targeted at
a supervisor process then it might be slightly delayed, but posix CPU
timers are inaccurate anyway due to the fact that they are tied to the
tick.

Provide infrastructure to schedule task work which allows splitting the
posix CPU timer code into a quick check in interrupt context and a thread
context expiry and signal delivery function. This has to be enabled by
architectures as it requires that the architecture specific KVM
implementation handles pending task work before exiting to guest mode.

Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarIngo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: default avatarOleg Nesterov <oleg@redhat.com>
Acked-by: default avatarPeter Zijlstra (Intel) <peterz@infradead.org>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20200730102337.783470146@linutronix.de
parent 820903c7
0% or .
You are about to add 0 people to the discussion. Proceed with caution.
Finish editing this message first!
Please register or to comment