On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Benjamin LaHaise wrote: > > Side note: this patch adds several function calls (4), several additional > L1 cache touches and a generally inefficient code path to *every single > interrupt that exits from the idle poll*, not to mention the extra (useless, > as it doesn't get used on 99.9% of deployed systems) function call and cache > touches to every single interrupt.
It is in fact possible that the floppy failure might just be from some timing-dependent thing, and the slowdown itself is the problem. Although I do find that a bit unlikely, since machines these days are about a million times faster than they used to be, so even if it's unnecessarily slow, it shouldn't be noticeable for a floppy drive. > Keep in mind that systems acting as routers will often be sitting in > the idle loop when processing interrupts. At the very least this > overhead (which is noticable on profiles) should be configurable. I > don't think that my 586 class embedded routers really need this crap to > be going into the kernel. I'm inclined to agree. Considering that the patch is known to cause problems, and that it's apparently broken on x86 *anyway* (the idle_notifier_register function isn't even exported), and considering that it's clearly bad for interrupt performance and could have been done a lot better, I would suggest just ripping it all out. And I think we should do the same for x86-64 too.. Linus - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/