RT balance v7

Ingo,

This series applies on GIT commit 2254c2e0184c603f92fc9b81016ff4bb53da622d
(2.6.24-rc4 (ish) git HEAD)

These patches replace v6 + v6b announced here:

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/11/20/613

 and

http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/11/21/226

The series is a collaborative effort between myself and Steven Rostedt.

Changes since v6:

*) cleaned up patch headers
*) fixed some checkpatch errors
*) incorporated v6<x> add-ons to one unified series

Synopsis:
---------------------

Most people don't care about RT tasks, but some of us do, and this series
helps us fix a problem with the current design.  We designed carefully to have
negligible impact on non RT code paths, and we believe we have achieved this
goal.

These tests against a 64-way SMP architecture show that the series doesn't
hurt those that don't care about RT tasks, but it helps out those that do.

http://people.redhat.com/srostedt/rt-benchmarks/

you can find a tarball of the entire series for your convenience here:

ftp://ftp.novell.com/dev/ghaskins/rt-balance-v7.tar.bz2

also, most of these patches have been incorporated into the later versions of
-rt which you can find in patch form here:

http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/rt/

or in prebuilt form here from opensuse-factory:

http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/SL-OSS-factory/...

Please consider for inclusion in the next convenient merge window.

Regards,
-Steven Rostedt, and Gregory Haskins