From: David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> To: lm@bitmover.com (Larry McVoy) Subject: Re: a joint letter on low latency and Linux Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2000 09:45:33 +0100 lm@bitmover.com said: > I'm 100% in agreement with the idea that all code paths through the > kernel should be short and sweet, but that isn't always the case. All > it takes is one misbehaving driver that hangs onto the CPU too long > and you missed your deadline. Don't Do That Then. The driver is broken, not the model. Fix it. It ought to be possible to devise a test for debugging drivers, similar in concept to the slab poisoning, which will BUG() if a process has blocked for too long. Could the NMI watchdog or something similar be extended to do this? Would we get a useful backtrace? This can automatically find many of the instances of badly-behaved code which causes high latency, but can also be turned off in production kernels. -- dwmw2 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/