cputime: Generic on-demand virtual cputime accounting

If we want to stop the tick further idle, we need to be
able to account the cputime without using the tick.

Virtual based cputime accounting solves that problem by
hooking into kernel/user boundaries.

However implementing CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING require
to set low level hooks and involves more overhead. But
we already have a generic context tracking subsystem
that is required for RCU needs by archs which will want to
shut down the tick outside idle.

This patch implements a generic virtual based cputime
accounting that relies on these generic kernel/user hooks.

There are some upsides of doing this:

- This requires no arch code to implement CONFIG_VIRT_CPU_ACCOUNTING
if context tracking is already built (already necessary for RCU in full
tickless mode).

- We can rely on the generic context tracking subsystem to dynamically
(de)activate the hooks, so that we can switch anytime between virtual
and tick based accounting. This way we don't have the overhead
of the virtual accounting when the tick is running periodically.

And a few downsides:

- It relies on jiffies and the hooks are set in high level code. This
results in less precise cputime accounting than with a true native
virtual based cputime accounting which hooks on low level code and use
a cpu hardware clock. Precision is not the goal of this though.

- There is probably more overhead than a native virtual based cputime
accounting. But this relies on hooks that are already set anyway.

Signed-off-by: Frederic Weisbecker <fweisbec@gmail.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Cc: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org>
Cc: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <peterz@infradead.org>
Cc: Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
5 files changed