tree 1376f2daf6be6d170a57e8e9b27411cf2fab6191
parent b17d5c6e190f3d328aae0444f8b93d58d0015714
author Nadav Har'El <nyh@math.technion.ac.il> 1330348049 +0200
committer Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com> 1330413199 +0200

vhost: don't forget to schedule()

This is a tiny, but important, patch to vhost.

Vhost's worker thread only called schedule() when it had no work to do, and
it wanted to go to sleep. But if there's always work to do, e.g., the guest
is running a network-intensive program like netperf with small message sizes,
schedule() was *never* called. This had several negative implications (on
non-preemptive kernels):

 1. Passing time was not properly accounted to the "vhost" process (ps and
    top would wrongly show it using zero CPU time).

 2. Sometimes error messages about RCU timeouts would be printed, if the
    core running the vhost thread didn't schedule() for a very long time.

 3. Worst of all, a vhost thread would "hog" the core. If several vhost
    threads need to share the same core, typically one would get most of the
    CPU time (and its associated guest most of the performance), while the
    others hardly get any work done.

The trivial solution is to add

	if (need_resched())
		schedule();

After doing every piece of work. This will not do the heavy schedule() all
the time, just when the timer interrupt decided a reschedule is warranted
(so need_resched returns true).

Thanks to Abel Gordon for this patch.

Signed-off-by: Nadav Har'El <nyh@il.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michael S. Tsirkin <mst@redhat.com>