mpsafe psm driver needed
John Baldwin
jhb at freebsd.org
Mon Jan 14 06:32:39 PST 2008
On Monday 14 January 2008 06:00:54 am Philip Paeps wrote:
> On 2008-01-13 21:25:03 (+0100), Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> > I've been looking at some mutex profiling traces from users of 6.x and 7.x
> > who are reporting that their mouse pointer sometimes freezes when their
> > system is busy. In most of the situations I have looked at this is because
> > the psm driver is Giant-locked, and competes with other things like the
> > syncer (in 6.x), or sysctl calls (I have a WIP for this that I need to
> > revisit).
> >
> > This is a minor problem from a grand architectural point of view but an
> > important one from a usability point of view. I believe these particular
> > interactivity problems would be resolved if the psm driver no longer
> > required Giant. Is anyone able to work on this?
>
> I have taken a look at this in the past. It's not a trivial problem.
>
> There is a lot of what I can only charitably call "legacy code" in psm and it
> appears that as soon as you touch any of it, it upsets at least one brand of
> KVM "out there".
>
> One of my mentees has been working on a rewrite for a while, but the project
> has not yet been committed to cvs.
>
> jls: any news on this?
Does psm(4) interface with any subsystems like tty(4)?
--
John Baldwin
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