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Re: [Xen-devel] Why have an idle domain? (Was: IDLE domain is scheduled

To: "Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins)" <dan.magenheimer@xxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] Why have an idle domain? (Was: IDLE domain is scheduled more than dom0)
From: Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 09:54:35 +0100
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On 12 Jul 2005, at 20:08, Magenheimer, Dan (HP Labs Fort Collins) wrote:

So is there any good reason to have an idle domain other than
because that's the way OS schedulers have always done it?

You can do whatever tricks you like in context_switch() when switching to/from the idle domain. arch/x86 already avoids switching most cpu state, so latency for short-blocking i/o domains is very small.

An idle domain is a convenient abstraction for thinking about the current scheduling state of a cpu -- it allows us to treat things more uniformly in the common code. Of course we can treat the idle domains very specially during state switch for performance.

I guess this will be even more important for arch/ia64, with the monstrous amount of architectural state to be switched.

 -- Keir


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