- we must not deliver messages from/to unstable address spaces.
In such a case, we must postpone the delivery. To make sute
that a process which is expecting an asynchronous message does
not starve, we must remember that we skipped delivery of some
messages and we must try to deliver again once the source
address space is stable again.
- when kernel copies from userspace, it must be sure that the TLB
entries are not stale and thus the referenced memory is correct
- everytime we change a process' address space we set p_stale_tlb
bits for all CPUs.
- Whenever a cpu finds its bit set when it wants to access the
process' memory, it refreshes the TLB
- it is more conservative than it needs to be but it has low
overhead than checking precisely
sys_umap now supports only:
- looking up the physical address of a virtual address in the address space
of the caller;
- looking up the physical address of a grant for which the caller is the
grantee.
This is enough for nearly all umap users. The new sys_umap_remote supports
lookups in arbitrary address spaces and grants for arbitrary grantees.
. 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
