tasklet latency and system calls on mips

From: Alexander Sirotkin (demiurg_at_ti.com)
Date: 08/13/03 

Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2003 16:43:42 +0300

Hello dearest all.

I have a question regarding tasklets on MIPS. I suspect that there is a
bug in generic MIPS kernel, but I'm not sure yet.

Linux kernel has a couple of so called "checkpoints" when the system
should check if there are tasklets to
run and run them in the following way :

if (softirq_pending(cpu))
                    do_softirq();

One of these places is at the end of interrupt handler (do_IRQ()),
however this is not the only place. I was under
impression that this code should be called after system call too. The
caveat here is that on MIPS (contrary to
other architectures, such as x86) system call is not an interrupt (it's
a different exception) and has completely
different handler. So in x86 it is sufficient to call

if (softirq_pending(cpu))
                    do_softirq();

at the end of do_IRQ because do_IRQ handles system call too, but on MIPS
it is not. Therefore I believe
these lines should be added to the end of sys_syscall function on MIPS.

What do you think ?

P.S. The whole issue started when we noticed that user process making
many system calls has very
significant impact on device drivers running in tasklet mode and no
impact whatsoever on device
drivers running in interrupt mode.

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