tree 2cbc50f434cf4397d2f279480ea2c2a87defa9b0
parent da6752964290567a6b4ea180d1becda75e810e87
author Venki Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com> 1178609264 -0700
committer Linus Torvalds <torvalds@woody.linux-foundation.org> 1178648105 -0700

Add support for deferrable timers

Introduce a new flag for timers - deferrable: Timers that work normally
when system is busy.  But, will not cause CPU to come out of idle (just to
service this timer), when CPU is idle.  Instead, this timer will be
serviced when CPU eventually wakes up with a subsequent non-deferrable
timer.

The main advantage of this is to avoid unnecessary timer interrupts when
CPU is idle.  If the routine currently called by a timer can wait until
next event without any issues, this new timer can be used to setup timer
event for that routine.  This, with dynticks, allows CPUs to be lazy,
allowing them to stay in idle for extended period of time by reducing
unnecesary wakeup and thereby reducing the power consumption.

This patch:

Builds this new timer on top of existing timer infrastructure.  It uses
last bit in 'base' pointer of timer_list structure to store this deferrable
timer flag.  __next_timer_interrupt() function skips over these deferrable
timers when CPU looks for next timer event for which it has to wake up.

This is exported by a new interface init_timer_deferrable() that can be
called in place of regular init_timer().

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: Privatise a #define]
Signed-off-by: Venkatesh Pallipadi <venkatesh.pallipadi@intel.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@elte.hu>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Cc: Oleg Nesterov <oleg@tv-sign.ru>
Cc: Dave Jones <davej@codemonkey.org.uk>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>