- 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)
In this second phase, scheduling is moved from PM to its own
scheduler (see r6557 for phase one). In the next phase we hope to a)
include useful information in the "out of quantum" message and b)
create some simple scheduling policy that makes use of that
information.
When the system starts up, PM will iterate over its process table and
ask SCHED to take over scheduling unprivileged processes. This is
done by sending a SCHEDULING_START message to SCHED. This message
includes the processes endpoint, the parent's endpoint and its nice
level. The scheduler adds this process to its schedproc table, issues
a schedctl, and returns its own endpoint to PM - as the endpoint of
the effective scheduler. When a process terminates, a SCHEDULING_STOP
message is sent to the scheduler.
The reason for this effective endpoint is for future compatibility.
Some day, we may have a scheduler that, instead of scheduling the
process itself, forwards the SCHEDULING_START message on to another
scheduler.
PM has information on who schedules whom. As such, scheduling
messages from user-land are sent through PM. An example is when
processes change their priority, using nice(). In that case, a
getsetpriority message is sent to PM, which then sends a
SCHEDULING_SET_NICE to the process's effective scheduler.
When a process is forked through PM, it inherits its parent's
scheduler, but is spawned with an empty quantum. As before, a request
to fork a process flows through VM before returning to PM, which then
wakes up the child process. This flow has been modified slightly so
that PM notifies the scheduler of the new process, before waking up
the child process. If the scheduler fails to take over scheduling,
the child process is torn down and the fork fails with an erroneous
value.
Process priority is entirely decided upon using nice levels. PM
stores a copy of each process's nice level and when a child is
forked, its parent's nice level is sent in the SCHEDULING_START
message. How this level is mapped to a priority queue is up to the
scheduler. It should be noted that the nice level is used to
determine the max_priority and the parent could have been in a lower
priority when it was spawned. To prevent a CPU intensive process from
hawking the CPU by continuously forking children that get scheduled
in the max_priority, the scheduler should determine in which queue
the parent is currently scheduled, and schedule the child in that
same queue.
Other fixes: The USER_Q in kernel/proc.h was incorrectly defined as
NR_SCHED_QUEUES/2. That results in a "off by one" error when
converting priority->nice->priority for nice=0. This also had the
side effect that if someone were to set the MAX_USER_Q to something
else than 0, then USER_Q would be off.
- This patch removes the time slice split between parent and child in
fork.
- The time slice of the parent remains unchanged and the child does
not have any.
- If the process has a scheduler, the scheduler must assign the
quantum and priority of the new process and let it run.
- If the child does not inherit a scheduler, it is scheduled by the
dummy default kernel policy. (servers, drivers, etc.)
- In theory, the scheduler can change the quantum even of the parent
process and implement any policy for splitting the quantum as
neither the parent nor the child are runnable. Sending the
out-of_quantum message on behalf of the processes may look like the
right solution, however, the scheduler would probably handle the
message before the whole fork protocol is finished. This way the
scheduler has absolute control when the process should become
runnable.
- it is not neccessary to test whether the scheduler is a system
process as the process already head permissions to make this call.
- it is better to test whether the scheduler has permission to make
changes to this process before testing whether the values are valid.
SYSLIB CHANGES:
- DS calls to publish / retrieve labels consider endpoints instead of u32_t.
VFS CHANGES:
- mapdriver() only adds an entry in the dmap table in VFS.
- dev_up() is only executed upon reception of a driver up event.
INET CHANGES:
- INET no longer searches for existing drivers instances at startup.
- A newtwork driver is (re)initialized upon reception of a driver up event.
- Networking startup is now race-free by design. No need to waste 5 seconds
at startup any more.
DRIVER CHANGES:
- Every driver publishes driver up events when starting for the first time or
in case of restart when recovery actions must be taken in the upper layers.
- Driver up events are published by drivers through DS.
- For regular drivers, VFS is normally the only subscriber, but not necessarily.
For instance, when the filter driver is in use, it must subscribe to driver
up events to initiate recovery.
- For network drivers, inet is the only subscriber for now.
- Every VFS driver is statically linked with libdriver, every network driver
is statically linked with libnetdriver.
DRIVER LIBRARIES CHANGES:
- Libdriver is extended to provide generic receive() and ds_publish() interfaces
for VFS drivers.
- driver_receive() is a wrapper for sef_receive() also used in driver_task()
to discard spurious messages that were meant to be delivered to a previous
version of the driver.
- driver_receive_mq() is the same as driver_receive() but integrates support
for queued messages.
- driver_announce() publishes a driver up event for VFS drivers and marks
the driver as initialized and expecting a DEV_OPEN message.
- Libnetdriver is introduced to provide similar receive() and ds_publish()
interfaces for network drivers (netdriver_announce() and netdriver_receive()).
- Network drivers all support live update with no state transfer now.
KERNEL CHANGES:
- Added kernel call statectl for state management. Used by driver_announce() to
unblock eventual callers sendrecing to the driver.
- cotributed by Bjorn Swift
- In this first phase, scheduling is moved from the kernel to the PM
server. The next steps are to a) moving scheduling to its own server
and b) include useful information in the "out of quantum" message,
so that the scheduler can make use of this information.
- The kernel process table now keeps record of who is responsible for
scheduling each process (p_scheduler). When this pointer is NULL,
the process will be scheduled by the kernel. If such a process runs
out of quantum, the kernel will simply renew its quantum an requeue
it.
- When PM loads, it will take over scheduling of all running
processes, except system processes, using sys_schedctl().
Essentially, this only results in taking over init. As children
inherit a scheduler from their parent, user space programs forked by
init will inherit PM (for now) as their scheduler.
- Once a process has been assigned a scheduler, and runs out of
quantum, its RTS_NO_QUANTUM flag will be set and the process
dequeued. The kernel will send a message to the scheduler, on the
process' behalf, informing the scheduler that it has run out of
quantum. The scheduler can take what ever action it pleases, based
on its policy, and then reschedule the process using the
sys_schedule() system call.
- Balance queues does not work as before. While the old in-kernel
function used to renew the quantum of processes in the highest
priority run queue, the user-space implementation only acts on
processes that have been bumped down to a lower priority queue.
This approach reacts slower to changes than the old one, but saves
us sending a sys_schedule message for each process every time we
balance the queues. Currently, when processes are moved up a
priority queue, their quantum is also renewed, but this can be
fiddled with.
- do_nice has been removed from kernel. PM answers to get- and
setpriority calls, updates it's own nice variable as well as the
max_run_queue. This will be refactored once scheduling is moved to a
separate server. We will probably have PM update it's local nice
value and then send a message to whoever is scheduling the process.
- changes to fix an issue in do_fork() where processes could run out
of quantum but bypassing the code path that handles it correctly.
The future plan is to remove the policy from do_fork() and implement
it in userspace too.
- before enabling paging VM asks kernel to resize its segments. This
may cause kernel to segfault if APIC is used and an interrupt
happens between this and paging enabled. As these are 2 separate
vmctl calls it is not atomic. This patch fixes this problem. VM does
not ask kernel to resize the segments in a separate call anymore.
The new segments limit is part of the "enable paging" call. It
generalizes this call in such a way that more information can be
passed as need be or the information may be completely different if
another architecture requires this.
