https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=342593#c3
Dieter Jurzitza changed:
What |Removed |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Status|NEEDINFO |NEW
Info Provider|dieter.jurzitza@t-online.de |
--- Comment #3 from Dieter Jurzitza 2007-11-19 15:06:30 MST ---
Some mainboards are sensitive to distributing specific interrupts between
different CPUs. More specifically this is the case for - at least - the Tyan
Tiger and Tyan Thunder mainboards with Athlon CPU.
At least those boards react allergic if you freely switch the interrupts
between CPU0 and CPU1 - don't ask me why. It is a known phenomen, probably
related to the AMD MP chipset. I have heard about other mainboards with similar
issues, however, I can only discuss things I know about.
So, IRQ-Balancer per default distributes interrupts on request, regardless
whether your system is sensitive to it or not. On the mainboards above this
means crashes, instability and what have you.
There are options to suppress this behaviour, however, irq_balancer is not easy
to configure in this regard. You would have to manually edit
/etc/init.d/irq_balancer and insert environment variables to take influence.
The IRQ-balancing benefit may be real on servers running heavy load. I can
hardly imagine that this is the usecase for the vast majority of openSUSE users
/ customers.
I'd guess:
Who does not know about this option would not really care. The improvement in
performance under normal home usage conditions is hardly perceivable.
Who does know about it (and hence what he does) can activate by himself (and on
his own risk).
Alternatively a script allowing to share specific interrupts to specific CPUs
would be (IMHO) more convenient to experienced users as it would provide the
freedom to assign intentionally.
(By the way: I could provide a rpm-package providing exactly this
functionality. But this is not the point)
Just my 2 cents here:
- performance loss: small
- risc reduction: significant
hence: remove the kernel dependency and leave irq_balancer an option for those
who know.
The main target IMHO should be reliability, not the last little bit of
performance. But again: my 2 cents here only.
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