rcu: Clarify help text for RCU_BOOST_PRIO

The old text confused real-time applications with real-time threads, so
that you pretty much needed to understand how this kernel configuration
parameter worked to understand the help text.  This commit therefore
attempts to make the help text human-readable.

Reported-by: Jörn Engel <joern@purestorage.com>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paul.mckenney@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul E. McKenney 2012-04-18 16:20:18 -07:00 committed by Paul E. McKenney
parent f88022a4f6
commit c9336643e1
1 changed files with 19 additions and 4 deletions

View File

@ -515,10 +515,25 @@ config RCU_BOOST_PRIO
depends on RCU_BOOST
default 1
help
This option specifies the real-time priority to which preempted
RCU readers are to be boosted. If you are working with CPU-bound
real-time applications, you should specify a priority higher then
the highest-priority CPU-bound application.
This option specifies the real-time priority to which long-term
preempted RCU readers are to be boosted. If you are working
with a real-time application that has one or more CPU-bound
threads running at a real-time priority level, you should set
RCU_BOOST_PRIO to a priority higher then the highest-priority
real-time CPU-bound thread. The default RCU_BOOST_PRIO value
of 1 is appropriate in the common case, which is real-time
applications that do not have any CPU-bound threads.
Some real-time applications might not have a single real-time
thread that saturates a given CPU, but instead might have
multiple real-time threads that, taken together, fully utilize
that CPU. In this case, you should set RCU_BOOST_PRIO to
a priority higher than the lowest-priority thread that is
conspiring to prevent the CPU from running any non-real-time
tasks. For example, if one thread at priority 10 and another
thread at priority 5 are between themselves fully consuming
the CPU time on a given CPU, then RCU_BOOST_PRIO should be
set to priority 6 or higher.
Specify the real-time priority, or take the default if unsure.