From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S274969AbTHRUrJ (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:47:09 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S275010AbTHRUrI (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:47:08 -0400 Received: from fw.osdl.org ([65.172.181.6]:16553 "EHLO mail.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S274969AbTHRUrE (ORCPT ); Mon, 18 Aug 2003 16:47:04 -0400 Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2003 13:32:26 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Linus Torvalds Cc: jgarzik@pobox.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Fix up riscom8 driver to use work queues instead of task queueing. Message-Id: <20030818133226.66986354.akpm@osdl.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20030818192529.GC19067@gtf.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 0.9.4 (GTK+ 1.2.10; i686-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Linus Torvalds wrote: > > > On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, Jeff Garzik wrote: > > > > There was talk in another thread about fixing up workqueue to create > > a new kernel thread, if one isn't available within five seconds. > > That's probably reasonable. Together with some upper limit to active > threads, along with timeouting old queues when idle it would be fairly > flexible. It's how basically all servers end up working, after all. It > shouldn't be that hard to do. > Note that pdflush is already doing this. It doesn't seem to work very well though: a) new threads seem to start up too late b) they probably don't hang around for long enough c) now that pdflush avoids blocking on queues it's all rather overkill anyway. pdflush could kinda-sorta be converted to use workqueues, but it doesn't want a thread per cpu.