There are cases where folks are using an interruptible swait when
using kthreads. This is rather confusing given you'd expect
interruptible waits to be -- interruptible, but kthreads are not
interruptible ! The reason for such practice though is to avoid
having these kthreads contribute to the system load average.
When systems are idle some kthreads may spend a lot of time blocking if
using swait_event_timeout(). This would contribute to the system load
average. On systems without preemption this would mean the load average
of an idle system is bumped to 2 instead of 0. On systems with PREEMPT=y
this would mean the load average of an idle system is bumped to 3
instead of 0.
This adds proper API using TASK_IDLE to make such goals explicit and
avoid confusion.
Suggested-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Acked-by: "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>
Tested-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
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