Messages in this thread | | | From | Denys Vlasenko <> | Subject | Does process need to have a kernel-side stack all the time? | Date | Mon, 14 Apr 2008 15:47:57 +0200 |
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Hi Ingo,
You are one of the experts in processes/threads and scheduling in Linux kernel, I hope you can answer this question.
A lot of effort went into minimizing of stack usage. If I understand it correctly, one of the reasons for this was to be efficient and not have lots of pages used for stacks when we have a lot of threads (tens of thousands).
A random thought occurred to me: in a system with so many threads most of them are not executing anyway, even on that gigantic Altix machines. Do they all need to have kernel stack, all the time? I mean: the process which is running in user space is not using kernel stack at all. Process which is not running on a CPU right now is not using it either. But they do still consume at least 4k (or 8k on 64bits) of RAM.
Process absolutely must have kernel stack only when it is actively running in kernel code (not sleeping), right?
Can we have per-CPU kernel stacks instead, so that process gets a kernel stack only every time it enters the kernel; and make it so that the process which is scheduled away from a CPU does not need to have kernel stack?
Currently, when process sleeps, we save some state in stack, and such a change may require some substantial surgery.
Can you tell me whether this is possible at all, and how difficult you estimate it to be? -- vda
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