2.6.36-rc7 with -ck1 and BFS 357

Since I was on the tail end of my hack fest and Linus announced 2.6.36-rc7, saying it was likely the last -rc, I figured it was a good opportunity to sync up my patches with mainline. As always, the porting of BFS brought some unexpected surprises where a simple port would probably work, but likely fail long term. So there were lots of little subtle changes that I had to make to BFS. Functionally this is virtually the same as BFS 357 for 2.6.35.7, apart from some minor tweaks to avoid new warnings. There was one teensy change to niffy_diff to also ensure a minimum difference was observed according to ticks, and the minimum difference was decreased from 1us to anything greater than 0 as the niffy clock may well be updated in less than 1us. One nice thing also came about from the update. I managed to remove some code when I realised the nohz_load_balancer I'd been maintaining in the BFS code was simply me blindly porting it a while back and not even realising what it was for. Of course there is no load balancing on BFS since it has a global runqueue which means all CPUs are always in balance, so there's no need for any special case balancing on nohz configs.

For those who want some overview of what was required to port it, there were some subtle changes to the try_to_wake_up code for notifying when workers are going to sleep with workqueues. Some reshuffling of what happens on context switch was ported. Some sched domains code was updated. rlimit code was tweaked. nohz balancing code was dropped. Checking that apparently idle CPUs were actually online was added to cope with changes on forking idle tasks on .36. And random other stuff I can't remember.

It's worth noting that you'll need a beta driver from nvidia if you're evil like me and use their evil binary drivers. See here: nvnews link for their latest drivers.

Anyway here's a directory that contains lrz compressed versions of all the patches, and an lrz compressed all-inclusive -ck1 and bfs357 patch. It's my secret plan that those wishing to try my pre-release patches must also grab lrzip, which I wrote, to access them :)

http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.36/

EDIT2: If you enable schedstats, you will need the patch called 2636rc7ck1-fixes.patch in that directory added to prevent build failures.