Looks good to me. But it didn't affect your machine at all, did it?
This stuff only counts when the machine is doing a lot of work. The current
IRQ balancer works well under high interrupt frequencies, but does quite the
wrong thing if you're doing a lot of softirq work at low interrupt
frequencies (gige routing with NAPI).
My gut feel is that we'll never get this right with a single in-kernel IRQ
balancer. So the proposal is to pull the IRQ balancer out altogether and to
then merge Arjan's userspace balancer into the main kernel tree.
It's a little radical to go placing userspace daemons into the kernel tree,
but I think it is appropriate - this thing is very tightly coupled to the
kernel.
The proposal has these advantages:
- No version skew problems: if the format of /proc/interrupts changes, we
patch the irq balance daemon at the same time.
- Can build irqbalanced into the intial initramfs image as part of kernel
build. (lacking klibc, we would need to statically link against glibc)
- Doing it in userspace means that we can do more things.
- The balancer can "know about" the differences between NICs, disk
controllers, etc.
- The balancer can be controlled by config files: "I am a router"
- The balancer can support non-x86 architectures
Anyway, that's the theory. None of it has been done yet.
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