tick: Add tick skew boot option

Let the user decide whether power consumption or jitter is the
more important consideration for their machines.

Quoting removal commit af5ab277ded04bd9bc6b048c5a2f0e7d70ef0867:

"Historically, Linux has tried to make the regular timer tick on the
 various CPUs not happen at the same time, to avoid contention on
 xtime_lock.
    
 Nowadays, with the tickless kernel, this contention no longer happens
 since time keeping and updating are done differently. In addition,
 this skew is actually hurting power consumption in a measurable way on
 many-core systems."

Problems:

- Contrary to the above, systems do encounter contention on both
  xtime_lock and RCU structure locks when the tick is synchronized.
  
- Moderate sized RT systems suffer intolerable jitter due to the tick
  being synchronized.

- SGI reports the same for their large systems.

- Fully utilized systems reap no power saving benefit from skew removal,
  but do suffer from resulting induced lock contention.

- 0209f649 rcu: limit rcu_node leaf-level fanout
  This patch was born to combat lock contention which testing showed
  to have been _induced by_ skew removal.  Skew the tick, contention
  disappeared virtually completely.

Signed-off-by: Mike Galbraith <mgalbraith@suse.de>
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/1336472458.21924.78.camel@marge.simpson.net
Signed-off-by: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>

1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
index b69cfdc12112..ea38cd1f0aba 100644
--- a/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
+++ b/Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt
@@ -2532,6 +2532,15 @@ bytes respectively. Such letter suffixes can also be entirely omitted.
 
         sched_debug     [KNL] Enables verbose scheduler debug messages.
 
+        skew_tick=      [KNL] Offset the periodic timer tick per cpu to mitigate
+                        xtime_lock contention on larger systems, and/or RCU lock
+                        contention on all systems with CONFIG_MAXSMP set.
+                        Format: { "0" | "1" }
+                        0 -- disable. (may be 1 via CONFIG_CMDLINE="skew_tick=1"
+                        1 -- enable.
+                        Note: increases power consumption, thus should only be
+                        enabled if running jitter sensitive (HPC/RT) workloads.
+
         security=       [SECURITY] Choose a security module to enable at boot.
                         If this boot parameter is not specified, only the first
                         security module asking for security registration will be