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 only renames schedcheck() to switch_to_user(),
cycles_accounting_stop() to context_stop() and restart() to
+restore_user_context()
- the motivation is that since the introduction of schedcheck() it has
been abused for many things. It deserves a better name. It should
express the fact that from the moment we call the function we are in
the process of switching to user.
- cycles_accounting_stop() was originally a single purpose function.
As this function is called at were convenient places it is used in
for other things too, e.g. (un)locking the kernel. Thus it deserves
a better name too.
- using the old name, restart() does not call schedcheck(), however
calls to restart are replaced by calls to schedcheck()
[switch_to_user] and it calls restart() [restore_user_context]
it does this by
- making all processes interruptible by running out of quantum
- giving all processes a single tick of quantum
- picking a random runnable process instead of in order, and
from a single pool of runnable processes (no priorities)
This together with very high HZ values currently provokes some race conditions
seen earlier only when running with SMP.
- this patch substitutes *xpp for sender to increase readability of
mini_receive().
- makes sure that the dequeued sender has p_q_link == NULL and that
this condition holds when enqueuing the sender again.
- it is a sanity check to make sure that the new sender is not
enqueued already. Before this change the dequeued sender's p_q_link
may not be NULL and it was only set to NULL when enqueued again.
- deadlock() is more verbose in case of a detected deadlock. First, it
lists all processses in the deadlock group. Then it prints the proc
extra info, not only stack trace and register dump
- this patch moves the former printslot() from arch_system.c to
debug.c and reimplements it slightly. The output is not changed,
however, the process information is printed in a separate function
print_proc() in debug.c as such a function is also handy in other
situations and should be publicly available when debugging.
this patch changes the way pagefaults are delivered to VM. It adopts
the same model as the out-of-quantum messages sent by kernel to a
scheduler.
- everytime a userspace pagefault occurs, kernel creates a message
which is sent to VM on behalf of the faulting process
- the process is blocked on delivery to VM in the standard IPC code
instead of waiting in a spacial in-kernel queue (stack) and is not
runnable until VM tell kernel that the pagefault is resolved and is
free to clear the RTS_PAGEFAULT flag.
- VM does not need call kernel and poll the pagefault information
which saves many (1/2?) calls and kernel calls that return "no more
data"
- VM notification by kernel does not need to use signals
- each entry in proc table is by 12 bytes smaller (~3k save)
- 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.
- this is a small addition to the userspace scheduling.
proc_kernel_scheduler() tests whether to use the default scheduling
policy in kernel. It is true if the process' scheduler is NULL _or_
self. Currently none of the tests was complete.
- 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.
this patch does not add or change any functionality of do_ipc(), it
only makes things a little cleaner (hopefully).
Until now do_ipc() was responsible for handling all ipc calls. The
catch is that SENDA is fairly different which results in some ugly
code like this typecasting and variables naming which does not make
much sense for SENDA and makes the code hard to read.
result = mini_senda(caller_ptr, (asynmsg_t *)m_ptr, (size_t)src_dst_e);
As it is called directly from assembly, the new do_ipc() takes as
input values of 3 registers in reg_t variables (it used to be 4,
however, bit_map wasn't used so I removed it), does the checks common
to all ipc calls and call the appropriate handler either for
do_sync_ipc() (all except SENDA) or mini_senda() (for SENDA) while
typecasting the reg_t values correctly. As a result, handling SENDA
differences in do_sync_ipc() is no more needed. Also the code that
uses msg_size variable is improved a little bit.
arch_do_syscall() is simplified too.
