Right now if we want to busy loop and not give up any time to the hypervisor
we put a very large value into smt_snooze_delay. This is sometimes useful
when running a single partition and you want to avoid any latencies due
to the hypervisor or CPU power state transitions. While this works, it's a bit
ugly - how big a number is enough now we have NO_HZ and can be idle for a very
long time.
The patch below makes smt_snooze_delay signed, and a negative value means loop
forever:
echo -1 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/smt_snooze_delay
This change shouldn't affect the existing userspace tools (eg ppc64_cpu), but
I'm cc-ing Nathan just to be sure.
Signed-off-by: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
b878dc0059