[PATCH RFC 0/4] Scheduler idle notifiers and users

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Wed, 2012-02-15 at 16:00 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:
> 
> > A third possibility is to self-IPI and take it from there.. assuming
> > these platforms can actually self-IPI.
> 
> Even if there was an IPI (not talking about SMP anyway) I'm not sure
> what good it would be.  We can (and do) get an IRQ from the LCD
> controller when its shutdown is complete, but that would have to be
> somehow propagated back up to the cpufreq code.  And the cpufreq code
> would have to know that the LCD controller was alive and therefore had
> to be waited for.  All sounds rather yucky to me. 

If can self-ipi from the scheduler context (which has IRQs disabled),
once you get to the ipi handler your scheduler locks are gone and you
can queue a worklet or wake some kthread to do all the sleeping stuff.