RE: [PATCH] idle using PNI monitor/mwait

[Zwane Mwaikambo]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Nakajima, Jun wrote:

> That's right. If we have a lot of high-contention locks in the kernel,
> we need to fix the code first, to get benefits for the other
> architectures. 
> 
> "mwait" granularity (64-byte, for example) is given by the cpuid
> instruction, and we did not use it because 1) it's unlikely that the
> other fields of the task structure are modified when it's idle, 2) the
> processor needs to check the flag after mwait anyway, to avoid waking up
> with a false signal caused by other break events (i.e. mwait is a hint).

It could still be very handy for polling loops of the form;

while (!ready)
	__asm__ ("pause;");

Jun would there be any thermal advantages over using poll and pause ?

Thanks,
	Zwane
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