. helps debugging output; you can see the difference
between parent and child easily (it's sometimes
confusing to see an expected endpoint number with
an unexpected name, i.e. before exec())
. when processes crash after fork and before exec, it's
an instant hint that that's what's going on, instead of
it being the parent (endpoint numbers don't usually convey
this)
. name returns to 'normal' after exec(), so *F isn't visible
normally at all. (Except for for RS which forks apparently.)
- flush TLB of processes only if the page tables has been changed and
the page tables of this process are already loaded on this cpu which
means that there might be stale entries in TLB. Until now SMP was
always flushing TLB to make sure everything is consistent.
- when profiling is compiled in kernel includes a 64M buffer for
sample
- 64M is the default used by profile tool as its buffer
- when using nmi profiling it is not possible to always copy sample
stright to userland as the nmi may (and does) happen in bad moments
- reduces sampling overhead as samples are copied out only when
profiling stops
- if profile --nmi kernel uses NMI watchdog based sampling based on
Intel architecture performance counters
- using NMI makes kernel profiling possible
- watchdog kernel lockup detection is disabled while sampling as we
may get unpredictable interrupts in kernel and thus possibly many
false positives
- if watchdog is not enabled at boot time, profiling enables it and
turns it of again when done
- when kernel profiles a process for the first time it saves an entry
describing the process [endpoint|name]
- every profile sample is only [endpoint|pc]
- profile utility creates a table of endpoint <-> name relations and
translates endpoints of samples into names and writing out the
results to comply with the processing tools
- "task" endpoints like KERNEL are negative thus we must cast it to
unsigned when hashing
- contributed by Bjorn Swift
- adds process accounting, for example counting the number of messages
sent, how often the process was preemted and how much time it spent
in the run queue. These statistics, along with the current cpu load,
are sent back to the user-space scheduler in the Out Of Quantum
message.
- the user-space scheduler may choose to make use of these statistics
when making scheduling decisions. For isntance the cpu load becomes
especially useful when scheduling on multiple cores.
- when a process is migrated to a different CPU it may have an active
FPU context in the processor registers. We must save it and migrate
it together with the process.
- RTS_VMINHIBIT flag is used to stop process while VM is fiddling with
its pagetables
- more generic way of sending synchronous scheduling events among cpus
- do the x-cpu smp sched calls only if the target process is runnable.
If it is not, it cannot be running and it cannot become runnable
this CPU holds the BKL
- sys_schedule can change only selected values, -1 means that the
current value should be kept unchanged. For instance we mostly want
to change the scheduling quantum and priority but we want to keep
the process at the current cpu
- RS can hand off its processes to scheduler
- service can read the destination cpu from system.conf
- RS can pass the information farther
- most global variables carry information which is specific to the
local CPU and each CPU must have its own copy
- cpu local variable must be declared in cpulocal.h between
DECLARE_CPULOCAL_START and DECLARE_CPULOCAL_END markers using
DECLARE_CPULOCAL macro
- to access the cpu local data the provided macros must be used
get_cpu_var(cpu, name)
get_cpu_var_ptr(cpu, name)
get_cpulocal_var(name)
get_cpulocal_var_ptr(name)
- using this macros makes future changes in the implementation
possible
- switching to ELF will make the declaration of cpu local data much
simpler, e.g.
CPULOCAL int blah;
anywhere in the kernel source code
- removes p_delivermsg_lin item from the process structure and code
related to it
- as the send part, the receive does not need to use the
PHYS_COPY_CATCH() and umap_local() couple.
- The address space of the target process is installed before
delivermsg() is called.
- unlike the linear address, the virtual address does not change when
paging is turned on nor after fork().
- FPU context is stored only if conflict between 2 FPU users or while
exporting context of a process to userspace while it is the active
user of FPU
- FPU has its owner (fpu_owner) which points to the process whose
state is currently loaded in FPU
- the FPU exception is only turned on when scheduling a process which
is not the owner of FPU
- FPU state is restored for the process that generated the FPU
exception. This process runs immediately without letting scheduler
to pick a new process to resolve the FPU conflict asap, to minimize
the FPU thrashing and FPU exception hadler execution
- faster all non-FPU-exception kernel entries as FPU state is not
checked nor saved
- removed MF_USED_FPU flag, only MF_FPU_INITIALIZED remains to signal
that a process has used FPU in the past
There seems to have been a broken assumption in the fpu context
restoring code. It restores the context of the running process, without
guarantee that the current process is the one that will be scheduled.
This caused fpu saving for a different process to be triggered without
fpu hardware being enabled, causing an fpu exception in the kernel. This
practically only shows up with DEBUG_RACE on. Fix my thruby+me.
The fix
. is to only set the fpu-in-use-by-this-process flag in the
exception handler, and then take care of fpu restoring when
actually returning to userspace
And the patch
. translates fpu saving and restoring to c in arch_system.c,
getting rid of a juicy chunk of assembly
. makes osfxsr_feature private to arch_system.c
. removes most of the arch dependent code from do_sigsend
- substituted the use of the m_source message field by
caller->p_endpoint in kernel calls. It is the same information, just
passed more intuitively.
- the last dependency on m_type field is removed.
- do_unused() is substituted by a check for NULL.
- this pretty much removes the depency of kernel calls on the general
message format. In the future this may be used to pass the kcall
arguments in a different structure or registers (x86-64, ARM?) The
kcall number may be passed in a register already.
- removes dependency of do_safecopy() on the m_type field of the kcall
messages.
- instead of do_safecopy() figuring out what action is requested, the
correct safecopy method is called right away.
- Currently the cpu time quantum is timer-ticks based. Thus the
remaining quantum is decreased only if the processes is interrupted
by a timer tick. As processes block a lot this typically does not
happen for normal user processes. Also the quantum depends on the
frequency of the timer.
- This change makes the quantum miliseconds based. Internally the
miliseconds are translated into cpu cycles. Everytime userspace
execution is interrupted by kernel the cycles just consumed by the
current process are deducted from the remaining quantum.
- It makes the quantum system timer frequency independent.
- The boot processes quantum is loosely derived from the tick-based
quantas and 60Hz timer and subject to future change
- the 64bit arithmetics is a little ugly, will be changes once we have
compiler support for 64bit integers (soon)
