[haiku-development] Re: Disabling CPU disabling

  • From: Pete Goodeve <pete.goodeve@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2013 18:58:38 -0700

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 07:23:55PM -0400, John Scipione wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Pawel Dziepak <pdziepak@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Since the scheduler code has grown quite big I am trying to remove as
> > much unnecessary logic as possible. The thing that caught my attention
> > is the possibility to disable a logical processor.
> >
> > As far as I understand there are two undocumented (i.e. BeBook doesn't
> > mention them but some old apps, e.g. Pulse, use them) syscalls
> > set_cpu_enabled and cpu_enabled that allow disabling/enabling a CPU
> > and check whether CPU is enabled. I don't really see why anyone would
> > like to use that. Definitely not for performance reasons. If because
> > of the energy consumption then the new scheduler has power saving mode
> > with small task packing which tries to keep as little CPUs running as
> > possible.
> >
> > So, unless there is any situation it may be useful to manually disable
> > CPU that I am missing, I am going to remove that feature [....]
> >
> > Anyone going to miss that feature?
> 
> It's a neat feature allowing you to test the system under load by
> dynamically turning a pocessors on and off to see the difference. I
> would definitely miss the feature if it were removed.
> 
Please leave it in place.  There have been quite a few times where
i wanted to check if multithreading in an app could be causing a race or
something, or just to see how much its performance is impacted by
the number of CPUs

Thanks,
        -- Pete --

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