Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 17:20:00 -0800
From: Matt Mackall <mpm@selenic.com>
To: Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>
Cc: "Jack O'Quin" <joq@io.com>, Arjan van de Ven <arjanv@redhat.com>,
       Lee Revell <rlrevell@joe-job.com>, Chris Wright <chrisw@osdl.org>,
       Paul Davis <paul@linuxaudiosystems.com>,
       Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>, Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>,
       mingo@elte.hu, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] [request for inclusion] Realtime LSM
Message-ID: <20050114012000.GF2940@waste.org>
References: <87y8ezzake.fsf@sulphur.joq.us> <20050112074906.GB5735@devserv.devel.redhat.com> <87oefuma3c.fsf@sulphur.joq.us> <20050113072802.GB13195@devserv.devel.redhat.com> <878y6x9h2d.fsf@sulphur.joq.us> <20050113210750.GA22208@devserv.devel.redhat.com> <1105651508.3457.31.camel@krustophenia.net> <20050113214320.GB22208@devserv.devel.redhat.com> <87oefs9a8z.fsf@sulphur.joq.us> <41E71746.3090607@kolivas.org>
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On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 11:50:14AM +1100, Con Kolivas wrote:
> Jack O'Quin wrote:
> >Arjan van de Ven <arjanv@redhat.com> writes:
> >
> >
> >>On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 04:25:08PM -0500, Lee Revell wrote:
> >>
> >>>The basic issue is that the current semantics of SCHED_FIFO seem make
> >>>the deadlock/data corruption due to runaway RT thread issue difficult.
> >>>The obvious solution is a new scheduling class equivalent to SCHED_FIFO
> >>>but with a mechanism for the kernel to demote the offending thread to
> >>>SCHED_OTHER in an emergency. 
> >>
> >>and this is getting really close to the original "counter proposal" to the
> >>LSM module that was basically "lets make lower nice limit an rlimit, and
> >>have -20 mean "basically FIFO" *if* the task behaves itself".
> >
> >
> >Yes.  However, my tests have so far shown a need for "actual FIFO as
> >long as the task behaves itself."
> 
> I should comment on this thread on lkml. After some 
> investigation/discussion and testing I came up with a proposal for this 
> problem. Since we are a general purpose operating system and not a hard 
> rt system (although addon patches are clearly making that a future 
> possibility) we need a solution that is satisfactory to a general...
> 
> There are two ways I suggested for this.
> 
> First, (and I am increasingly believing in the second) is to implement a 
> new scheduling class for isochronous scheduling. This would be a class 
> for unprivileged users, and behave like SCHED_RR (to avoid complications 
> of QoS features we dont have infrastrucutre for) at a priority just 
> above SCHED_NORMAL, but below all privileged SCHED_RR and SCHED_FIFO. 
> Importantly, a soft cpu limit and rate period can be set by default for 
> this scheduling class that provides good true SCHED_RR performance, and 
> is configurable. Literature suggests that 70% is adequate cpu for good 
> real time performance and would be starvation free. I believe setting 
> 70% with 10% hysteresis (dropping to say 63% on hitting limit) would be 
> a good start. Beyond this, however, to satisfy the needs of those with 
> more demanding setups, a simple configurable runtime setting to set both 
> the cpu% and the rate period could be available to something as simple 
> as proc
> /proc/sys/kernel/iso_cpu
> /proc/sys/kernel/iso_cpu_period
> where iso_cpu is set to 70, and period to maybe 1 second. The actual 
> mode of setting this tunable is not important, and could be in /sys or 
> whatever

This sounds promising, but I think it still needs to be privileged.
See a) below.

> The second option is to not implement a new scheduling class at all, and 
> allow unprivileged users to use either SCHED_FIFO or SCHED_RR, but to 
> make the cpu constraints described for SCHED_ISO above apply to their 
> use of those classes. Supporting priority settings for these could be 
> possible, but in my opinion, it would work as a better class if they 
> only had one priority level, as for the SCHED_ISO implementation above 
> (better than any SCHED_NORMAL, but lower than privileged SCHED_RR/FIFO).

a) How to arbitrate between competing unprivileged users that want
pseudo-SCHED_FIFO? Do they all lose?
b) Priority levels are important here, we want to be able to do things
like have audio run at higher priority than video.

> 
> This latter approach to me seems the least invasive and most user and 
> sysadmin friendly method.
> 
> What was amusing to me was that after I suggested the latter option, I 
> discovered that was basically what OSX does, however being not a real 
> multi-user operating system they had absurd limits for cpu at 90% by 
> default. Theory suggests 70% should be a good default limit.
> 
> Cheers,
> Con


-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.
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