Kernel development

Release status

Kernel release status

The current stable 2.6 release is 2.6.12.4, which was announced on August 5.

The current 2.6 prepatch is 2.6.13-rc6, released by Linus on August 7. This prepatch contains a fix for recent aic7xxx performance problems (so extra testing by people with the relevant hardware is being requested), the removal of a few patches which caused regressions, and a number of fixes. The long-format changelog has the details.

Linus's git repository contains a very small number of fixes added since -rc6. It appears that the August 12 to 19 time frame for 2.6.13 found in Andrew Morton's kernel status report may be just about right.

The current -mm tree is 2.6.13-rc5-mm1. Recent additions to -mm include a relayfs update, a new kzalloc() function (see below), some debugging helpers from the realtime preemption patch set, some architecture updates, and lots of fixes.

The current 2.4 prepatch is 2.4.32-pre3, released by Marcelo on August 8. This prepatch adds a handful of fixes and a 2.6 serial ATA backport.

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Kernel development news

Quote of the week

-- Linus Torvalds

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Toward more robust network-based block I/O

One thing which came out of this year's Kernel Summit is that the kernel still does not deal well with network-based block devices when memory gets tight. If the system is full of dirty memory, the kernel must write some of those dirty pages to their backing store so that the memory may be reused. But the act of writing that data over the network can require the allocation of more memory. Even worse, completing network-based I/O requires the ability to receive the acknowledgment packets back from the remote device. Not only does that packet reception require memory, but the system must contend with the fact that the network could also be the source of vast numbers of packets which are completely unrelated to the problem at hand. If the system cannot find a way to receive the packets it needs while ignoring unrelated packets, extreme memory pressure will eventually lead to a lockup.

Solving this problem is hard. At the Summit, Linus suggested that it might not even make sense to try; instead, users should be directed toward I/O hardware which does not present this sort of problem. In reality, however, Linux will do its best to support network-based block devices. Daniel Phillips has recently been working on a patch which tries to make some progress in that direction.

Like many before him, Daniel bases his approach on the use of preallocated memory pools - a chunk of memory which is set aside for use when no other memory is available. Daniel has tried to take things a little further by quantifying how much memory should be set aside. To that end, each network driver should, when an interface is brought up, make a call to:

    int adjust_memalloc_reserve(int pages);

Where pages is the number of pages required to be able to continue to receive packets on the given interface. A helper function, estimate_skb_pages(), can come up with a guess for how many pages will be required to hold a given number of packets with a specified maximum size. The call to adjust_memalloc_reserve() will cause the virtual memory subsystem to set aside the given number of pages for emergency use by the driver. In this way, it is hoped, the system will reserve a sufficient amount of memory without being overly wasteful.

Memory can be allocated from the reserve by adding the new __GFP_MEMALLOC flag to the allocation request. A new networking helper function, dev_memalloc_skb(), will use that flag if necessary to obtain a packet. Before doing so, however, it checks a count of packets allocated from the reserve; no interface is allowed to allocate beyond a maximum count, which defaults to 50. Unlike previous versions of the patch, the current code does not attempt to track which packets, in particular, were allocated from reserve memory. Any packets which originate from a given device will, when returned to the system, be credited to that device's reserve.

A longstanding problem with the reserve approach is that, if one is not careful, the reserve simply gets depleted and the system runs out of memory anyway. In a situation where memory use is not entirely within the system's control - when dealing with incoming network data, for example - this sort of depletion is especially likely. Your system may be doing its best to flush dirty pages to your home iSCSI array, but the network memory reserves are full of incoming music being downloaded by your children, so the entire system comes to a halt. Such an outcome may please the RIAA, but the kernel developers are trying to satisfy a different audience.

Daniel's answer to this problem is to add a special flag to network sockets which are involved in block I/O. Only sockets marked with SOCK_MEMALLOC are entitled to use packet memory from the reserves. When the packet arrives on the interface, the system cannot know whether it is useful or not, so that packet must be received (possibly using reserve memory) and fed into the system in the usual way. The protocol code, however, is expected to check each packet to see whether it comes from a device which is currently using reserve memory. If so, and the packet does not belong to a suitably-marked socket, that packet is to be dropped immediately. In this way, it is hoped, the system will be able to focus its remaining resources on recovering from its memory crunch.

This approach may have some promise. This patch needs some work, however, before it is ready for serious stress testing. Once it has been worked into shape, the patch can be applied to a suitably-equipped system, which can then be pushed into a state of serious memory pressure. That point has been the downfall of a number of other approaches to this problem; whether Daniel's work is up to this test remains to be seen.

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kzalloc()

The kernel code base is full of functions which allocate memory with kmalloc(), then zero it with memset(). Recently, Pekka Enberg concluded that much of this code could be cleaned up by using kcalloc() instead. kcalloc() has this prototype:

    void *kcalloc(size_t n, size_t size, unsigned int __nocast gfp_flags);

This function will allocate an array of n items, and will zero the entire array before returning it to the caller. Pekka's patch converted a number of kmalloc()/memset() pairs over to kcalloc(), but that patch drew a complaint from Andrew Morton:

Very few callers actually need to allocate an array of items, so the extra argument is unneeded in most cases. Each instance of that argument adds a bit to the size of the kernel, and, over time, that space adds up. The solution was to create yet another allocation function:

    void *kzalloc(size_t size, unsigned int __nocast gfp_flags);

This function returns a single, zeroed item. It has been added to -mm, with its appearance in the mainline likely to happen for 2.6.14.

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Time to merge GFS?

Red Hat recently announced that Fedora Core 4 was available with the Global Filesystem (GFS). Like Oracle's OCFS2, GFS allows a tightly-linked cluster to manage filesystems stored on a shared disk. Now that GFS is actually shipping, Red Hat would like to see it merged into the mainline kernel. Thus, recently, David Teigland posted the patches for review and asked for feedback. He got some.

One issue has to do with locking. Since the filesystem is kept on shared storage, the nodes of the cluster must take care to avoid stepping on each others' toes and corrupting things. The distributed lock manager (DLM) subsystem is used to that end; whenever a node wishes to access a particular block on the filesystem, it first obtains a cluster-wide lock on that block. As long as the filesystem only supports the read() and write() system calls, this locking works reasonably well. The filesystem code can obtain the locks it needs, perform the operation, then return the locks, and all works well.

The problem comes in when the filesystem supports mmap() as well. Accesses to memory mapped with mmap() does not happen with the read() and write() system calls; it is, instead, done with regular memory operations. Locking in this case is handled in conjunction with the virtual memory subsystem; the permissions on any particular page are set to be consistent with the level of lock currently held by the local node. If the node does not have a lock for a specific block in the filesystem, the page table entry for the corresponding page will show that page as being absent. If the process which made the mapping tries to access the page, it will incur a page fault; the filesystems nopage() method can then set up the mapping, acquiring whatever locks are required.

Page faults are asynchronous events. In particular, a page fault could happen while the kernel is busy handling a read() or write() operation somewhere else in the filesystem. In this case, the kernel will be acquiring two independent locks in the filesystem, and in an arbitrary order. It does not take much experience with locking to learn that, when multiple locks are to be acquired, the order in which they are taken is critical. Consider a case where there are two locks (call them "A" and "B") and two processes needing them. Imagine that one process acquires A, while the other acquires B. Each process then attempts to grab the remaining lock. At this point, both processes will wait forever; this situation is called an "ABBA deadlock." Contrary to what some may believe, the term has nothing to do with 1970's Swedish rock bands.

Avoiding this kind of deadlock requires a fair amount of ugly filesystem trickery; Zach Brown put it this way:

Sorting this situation out properly will probably require some sort of support at the VFS layer. In that way, one hopes, a single, working solution would be found. The alternative seems to be a bunch of brittle and complicated code in each filesystem which has this problem.

Another glitch encountered by GFS is its support for "context-dependent path names." These are, in essence, symbolic links with magic properties. The GFS code, if it encounters "@hostname" as a component in a symbolic link, will substitute the name of the current host. Similar substitutions will happen for @mach, @os, @uid, and others. There is also support for an alternative syntax ("{hostname}"), for whatever reason.

This mechanism exists to allow cluster nodes to establish private areas on a shared disk. It can also be used, for example, to create architecture-specific directories full of binaries on a common path. In the past, administrators have used automounter trickery to a very similar end. The filesystem hackers, who do not like to see this sort of magic buried within individual filesystems, suggest that bind mounts should be used instead. That technique, however, is relatively cumbersome and error-prone, so there is some interest in finding a way to maintain the sort of functionality implemented by context-dependent links.

The objections to context-dependent links include the addition of magic to parts of the filesystem namespace and the fact that they are specific to one filesystem. Moving the resolution of these links up to the VFS layer could be a part of the solution, since it would then at least function the same way for all filesystems. Adding this kind of semantics may always be a hard sell, however, since it changes the way Linux filesystems are expected to behave. The old, automounter-based approach may end up being the recommended technique for those needing this sort of behavior.

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A realtime preemption overview

There have been a considerable number of papers describing a number of different aspects of and approaches to realtime, a few of which were listed in the RESOURCES section of my "realtime patch acceptance summary from July.

However, there does not appear to be a similar description of the realtime preemption (PREEMPT_RT) patch. This document attempts to fill this gap, using the V0.7.52-16 version of this patch. However, please note that the PREEMPT_RT patch evolves very quickly!

Philosophy of PREEMPT_RT

The key point of the PREEMPT_RT patch is to minimize the amount of kernel code that is non-preemptible, while also minimizing the amount of code that must be changed in order to provide this added preemptibility. In particular, critical sections, interrupt handlers, and interrupt-disable code sequences are normally preemptible. The PREEMPT_RT patch leverages the SMP capabilities of the Linux kernel to add this extra preemptibility without requiring a complete kernel rewrite. In a sense, one can loosely think of a preemption as the addition of a new CPU to the system, and then use the normal locking primitives to synchronize with any action taken by the preempting task.

Note that this statement of philosophy should not be taken too literally, for example, the PREEMPT_RT patch does not actually perform a CPU hot-plug event for each preemption. Instead, the point is that the underlying mechanisms used to tolerate (almost) unlimited preemption are those that must be provided for SMP environments. More information on how this philosophy is applied is given in the following sections.

Features of PREEMPT_RT

This section gives an overview of the features that the PREEMPT_RT patch provides.

1. Preemptible critical sections
2. Preemptible interrupt handlers
3. Preemptible "interrupt disable" code sequences
4. Priority inheritance for in-kernel spinlocks and semaphores
5. Deferred operations
6. Latency-reduction measures

Each of these topics is covered in the following sections.

Preemptible critical sections

In PREEMPT_RT, normal spinlocks (spinlock_t and rwlock_t) are preemptible, as are RCU read-side critical sections (rcu_read_lock() and rcu_read_unlock()). Semaphore critical sections are preemptible, but they already are in both PREEMPT and non-PREEMPT kernels (but more on semaphores later). This preemptibility means that you can block while acquiring a spinlock, which in turn means that it is illegal to acquire a spinlock with either preemption or interrupts disabled (the one exception to this rule being the _trylock variants, at least as long as you don't repeatedly invoke them in a tight loop). This also means that spin_lock_irqsave() does -not- disable hardware interrupts when used on a spinlock_t.

Quick Quiz #1: How can semaphore critical sections be preempted in a non-preemptible kernel?

So, what to do if you need to acquire a lock when either interrupts or preemption are disabled? You use a raw_spinlock_t instead of a spinlock_t, but continue invoking spin_lock() and friends on the raw_spinlock_t. The PREEMPT_RT patch includes a set of macros that cause spin_lock() to act like a C++ overloaded function -- when invoked on a raw_spinlock_t, it acts like a traditional spinlock, but when invoked on a spinlock_t, its critical section can be preempted. For example, the various _irq primitives (e.g., spin_lock_irqsave()) disable hardware interrupts when applied to a raw_spinlock_t, but do not when applied to a spinlock_t. However, use of raw_spinlock_t (and its rwlock_t counterpart, raw_rwlock_t) should be the exception, not the rule. These raw locks should not be needed outside of a few low-level areas, such as the scheduler, architecture-specific code, and RCU.

Since critical sections can now be preempted, you cannot rely on a given critical section executing on a single CPU -- it might move to a different CPU due to being preempted. So, when you are using per-CPU variables in a critical section, you must separately handle the possibility of preemption, since spinlock_t and rwlock_t are no longer doing that job for you. Approaches include:

1. Explicitly disable preemption, either through use of get_cpu_var(), preempt_disable(), or disabling hardware interrupts.

2. Use a per-CPU lock to guard the per-CPU variables. One way to do this is by using the new DEFINE_PER_CPU_LOCKED() primitive -- more on this later.

Since spin_lock() can now sleep, an additional task state was added. Consider the following code sequence (supplied by Ingo Molnar):

	spin_lock(&mylock1);
	current->state = TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE;
	spin_lock(&mylock2);                    // [*]
	blah();
	spin_unlock(&mylock2);
	spin_unlock(&mylock1);

Since the second spin_lock() call can sleep, it can clobber the value of current->state, which might come as quite a surprise to the blah() function. The new TASK_RUNNING_MUTEX bit is used to allow the scheduler to preserve the prior value of current->state in this case.

Although the resulting environment can be a bit unfamiliar, but it permits critical sections to be preempted with minimal code changes, and allows the same code to work in the PREEMPT_RT, PREEMPT, and non-PREEMPT configurations.

Preemptible interrupt handlers

Almost all interrupt handlers run in process context in the PREEMPT_RT environment. Although any interrupt can be marked SA_NODELAY to cause it to run in interrupt context, only the fpu_irq, irq0, irq2, and lpptest interrupts have SA_NODELAY specified. Of these, only irq0 (the per-CPU timer interrupt) is normally used -- fpu_irq is for floating-point co-processor interrupts, and lpptest is used for interrupt-latency benchmarking. Note that software timers (add_timer() and friends) do not run in hardware interrupt context; instead, they run in process context and are fully preemptible.

Note that SA_NODELAY is not to be used lightly, as can greatly degrade both interrupt and scheduling latencies. The per-CPU timer interrupt qualifies due to its tight tie to scheduling and other core kernel components. Furthermore, SA_NODELAY interrupt handlers must be coded very carefully as noted in the following paragraphs, otherwise, you will see oopses and deadlocks.

Since the per-CPU timer interrupt (e.g., scheduler_tick()) runs in hardware-interrupt context, any locks shared with process-context code must be raw spinlocks (raw_spinlock_t or raw_rwlock_t), and, when acquired from process context, the _irq variants must be used, for example, spin_lock_irqsave(). In addition, hardware interrupts must typically be disabled when process-context code accesses per-CPU variables that are shared with the SA_NODELAY interrupt handler, as described in the following section.

Preemptible "interrupt disable" code sequences

The concept of preemptible interrupt-disable code sequences may seem to be a contradiction in terms, but it is important to keep in mind the PREEMPT_RT philosophy. This philosophy relies on the SMP capabilities of the Linux kernel to handle races with interrupt handlers, keeping in mind that most interrupt handlers run in process context. Any code that interacts with an interrupt handler must be prepared to deal with that interrupt handler running concurrently on some other CPU.

Therefore, spin_lock_irqsave() and related primitives need not disable preemption. The reason this is safe is that if the interrupt handler runs, even if it preempts the code holding the spinlock_t, it will block as soon as it attempts to acquire that spinlock_t. The critical section will therefore still be preserved.

However, local_irq_save() still disables preemption, since there is no corresponding lock to rely on. Using locks instead of local_irq_save() therefore can help reduce scheduling latency, but substituting locks in this manner can reduce SMP performance, so be careful.

Code that must interact with SA_NODELAY interrupts cannot use local_irq_save(), since this does not disable hardware interrupts. Instead, raw_local_irq_save() should be used. Similarly, raw spinlocks (raw_spinlock_t, raw_rwlock_t, and raw_seqlock_t) need to be used when interacting with SA_NODELAY interrupt handlers. However, raw spinlocks and raw interrupt disabling should -not- be used outside of a few low-level areas, such as the scheduler, architecture-dependent code, and RCU.

Priority inheritance for in-kernel spinlocks and semaphores

Realtime programmers are often concerned about priority inversion, which can happen as follows:

• Low-priority task A acquires a resource, for example, a lock.

• Medium-priority task B starts executing CPU-bound, preempting low-priority task A.

• High-priority task C attempts to acquire the lock held by low-priority task A, but blocks because of medium-priority task B having preempted low-priority task A.

Such priority inversion can indefinitely delay a high-priority task. There are two main ways to address this problem: (1) suppressing preemption and (2) priority inheritance. In the first case, since there is no preemption, task B cannot preempt task A, preventing priority inversion from occurring. This approach is used by PREEMPT kernels for spinlocks, but not for semaphores. It does not make sense to suppress preemption for semaphores, since it is legal to block while holding one, which could result in priority inversion even in absence of preemption. For some realtime workloads, preemption cannot be suppressed even for spinlocks, due to the impact to scheduling latencies.

Priority inheritance can be used in cases where suppressing preemption does not make sense. The idea here is that high-priority tasks temporarily donate their high priority to lower-priority tasks that are holding critical locks. This priority inheritance is transitive: in the example above, if an even higher priority task D attempted to acquire a second lock that high-priority task C was already holding, then both tasks C and A would be be temporarily boosted to the priority of task D. The duration of the priority boost is also sharply limited: as soon as low-priority task A releases the lock, it will immediately lose its temporarily boosted priority, handing the lock to (and being preempted by) task C.

However, it may take some time for task C to run, and it is quite possible that another higher-priority task E will try to acquire the lock in the meantime. If this happens, task E will "steal" the lock from task C, which is legal because task C has not yet run, and has therefore not actually acquired the lock. On the other hand, if task C gets to run before task E tries to acquire the lock, then task E will be unable to "steal" the lock, and must instead wait for task C to release it, possibly boosting task C's priority in order to expedite matters.

In addition, there are some cases where locks are held for extended periods. A number of these have been modified to add "preemption points" so that the lock holder will drop the lock if some other task needs it. The JBD journaling layer contains a couple of examples of this.

It turns out that write-to-reader priority inheritance is particularly problematic, so PREEMPT_RT simplifies the problem by permitting only one task at a time to read-hold a reader-writer lock or semaphore, though that task is permitted to recursively acquire it. This makes priority inheritance doable, though it can limit scalability.

Quick Quiz #2: What is a simple and fast way to implement priority inheritance from writers to multiple readers?

In addition, there are some cases where priority inheritance is undesirable for semaphores, for example, when the semaphore is being used as an event mechanism rather than as a lock (you can't tell who will post the event before the fact, and therefore have no idea which task to priority-boost). There are compat_semaphore and compat_rw_semaphore variants that may be used in this case. The various semaphore primitives (up(), down(), and friends) may be used on either compat_semaphore and semaphore, and, similarly, the reader-writer semaphore primitives (up_read(), down_write(), and friends) may be used on either compat_rw_semaphore and rw_semaphore. Often, however, the completion mechanism is a better tool for this job.

So, to sum up, priority inheritance prevents priority inversion, allowing high-priority tasks to acquire locks and semaphores in a timely manner, even if the locks and semaphores are being held by low-priority tasks. PREEMPT_RT's priority inheritance provides transitivity, timely removal of inheritance, and the flexibility required to handle cases when high priority tasks suddenly need locks earmarked for low-priority tasks. The compat_semaphore and compat_rw_semaphore declarations can be used to avoid priority inheritance for semaphores for event-style usage.

Deferred operations

Since spin_lock() can now sleep, it is no longer legal to invoke it while preemption (or interrupts) are disabled. In some cases, this has been solved by deferring the operation requiring the spin_lock() until preemption has been re-enabled:

• put_task_struct_delayed() queues up a put_task_struct() to be executed at a later time when it is legal to acquire (for example) the spinlock_t alloc_lock in task_struct.

• mmdrop_delayed() queues up an mmdrop() to be executed at a later time, similar to put_task_struct_delayed() above.

• TIF_NEED_RESCHED_DELAYED does a reschedule, but waits to do so until the process is ready to return to user space -- or until the next preempt_check_resched_delayed(), whichever comes first. Either way, the point is avoid needless preemptions in cases where a high-priority task being awakened cannot make progress until the current task drops a lock. Without TIF_NEED_RESCHED_DELAYED, the high-priority task would immediately preempt the low-priority task, only to quickly block waiting for the lock held by the low-priority task.

  The solution is to change a "wake_up()" that is immediately followed by a spin_unlock() to instead be a "wake_up_process_sync()". If the process being awakened would preempt the current process, the wakeup is delayed via the TIF_NEED_RESCHED_DELAYED flag.

In all of these situations, the solution is to defer an action until that action may be more safely or conveniently performed.

Latency-reduction measures

There are a few changes in PREEMPT_RT whose primary purpose is to reduce scheduling or interrupt latency.

The first such change involves the x86 MMX/SSE hardware. This hardware is handled in the kernel with preemption disabled, and this sometimes means waiting until preceding MMX/SSE instructions complete. Some MMX/SSE instructions are no problem, but others take overly long amounts of time, so PREEMPT_RT refuses to use the slow ones.

The second change applies per-CPU variables to the slab allocator, as an alternative to the previous wanton disabling of interrupts.

Summary of PREEMPT_RT primitives

This section gives a brief list of primitives that are either added by PREEMPT_RT or whose behavior is significantly changed by PREEMPT_RT.

Locking Primitives

spinlock_t

Critical sections are preemptible. The _irq operations (e.g., spin_lock_irqsave()) do -not- disable hardware interrupts. Priority inheritance is used to prevent priority inversion. An underlying rt_mutex is used to implement spinlock_t in PREEMPT_RT (as well as to implement rwlock_t, struct semaphore, and struct rw_semaphore).

raw_spinlock_t

Special variant of spinlock_t that offers the traditional behavior, so that critical sections are non-preemptible and _irq operations really disable hardware interrupts. Note that you should use the normal primitives (e.g., spin_lock()) on raw_spinlock_t. That said, you shouldn't be using raw_spinlock_t -at- -all- except deep within architecture-specific code or low-level scheduling and synchronization primitives. Misuse of raw_spinlock_t will destroy the realtime aspects of PREEMPT_RT. You have been warned.

rwlock_t

Critical sections are preemptible. The _irq operations (e.g., write_lock_irqsave()) do -not- disable hardware interrupts. Priority inheritance is used to prevent priority inversion. In order to keep the complexity of priority inheritance down to a dull roar, only one task may read-acquire a given rwlock_t at a time, though that task may recursively read-acquire the lock.

RW_LOCK_UNLOCKED(mylock)

The RW_LOCK_UNLOCKED macro now takes the lock itself as an argument, which is required for priority inheritance. Unfortunately, this makes its use incompatible with the PREEMPT and non-PREEMPT kernels. Uses of RW_LOCK_UNLOCKED should therefore be changed to DEFINE_RWLOCK().

raw_rwlock_t

Special variant of rwlock_t that offers the traditional behavior, so that critical sections are non-preemptible and _irq operations really disable hardware interrupts. Note that you should use the normal primitives (e.g., read_lock()) on raw_rwlock_t. That said, as with raw_spinlock_t, you shouldn't be using raw_rwlock_t -at- -all- except deep within architecture-specific code or low-level scheduling and synchronization primitives. Misuse of raw_rwlock_t will destroy the realtime aspects of PREEMPT_RT. You have once again been warned.

seqlock_t

Critical sections are preemptible. Priority inheritance has been applied to the update side (the read-side cannot be involved in priority inversion, since seqlock_t readers do not block writers).

SEQLOCK_UNLOCKED(name)

The SEQLOCK_UNLOCKED macro now takes the lock itself as an argument, which is required for priority inheritance. Unfortunately, this makes its use incompatible with the PREEMPT and non-PREEMPT kernels. Uses of SEQLOCK_UNLOCKED should therefore be changed to use DECLARE_SEQLOCK(). Note that DECLARE_SEQLOCK() defines the seqlock_t and initializes it.

struct semaphore

The struct semaphore is now subject to priority inheritance.

down_trylock()

This primitive can schedule, so cannot be invoked with hardware interrupts disabled or with preemption disabled. However, since almost all interrupts run in process context with both preemption and interrupts enabled, this restriction has no effect thus far.

struct compat_semaphore

A variant of struct semaphore that is -not- subject to priority inheritance. This is useful for cases when you need an event mechanism, rather than a sleeplock.

struct rw_semaphore

The struct rw_semaphore is now subject to priority inheritance, and only one task at a time may read-hold. However, that task may recursively read-acquire the rw_semaphore.

struct compat_rw_semaphore

A variant of struct rw_semaphore that is -not- subject to priority inheritance. Again, this is useful for cases when you need an event mechanism, rather than a sleeplock.

Quick Quiz #3: Why can't event mechanisms use priority inheritance?

Per-CPU Variables

DEFINE_PER_CPU_LOCKED(type, name)

DECLARE_PER_CPU_LOCKED(type, name)

Define/declare a per-CPU variable with the specified type and name, but also define/declare a corresponding spinlock_t. If you have a group of per-CPU variables that you want to be protected by a spinlock, you can always group them into a struct.

get_per_cpu_locked(var, cpu)

Return the specified per-CPU variable for the specified CPU, but only after acquiring the corresponding spinlock.

put_per_cpu_locked(var, cpu)

Release the spinlock corresponding to the specified per-CPU variable for the specified CPU.

per_cpu_lock(var, cpu)

Returns the spinlock corresponding to the specified per-CPU variable for the specified CPU, but as an lvalue. This can be useful when invoking a function that takes as an argument a spinlock that it will release.

per_cpu_locked(var, cpu)

Returns the specified per-CPU variable for the specified CPU as an lvalue, but without acquiring the lock, presumably because you have already acquired the lock but need to get another reference to the variable. Or perhaps because you are making an RCU-read-side reference to the variable, and therefore do not need to acquire the lock.

Interrupt Handlers

SA_NODELAY

Used in the struct irqaction to specify that the corresponding interrupt handler should be directly invoked in hardware-interrupt context rather than being handed off to an irq thread. The function redirect_hardirq() does the wakeup, and the interrupt-processing loop may be found in do_irqd().

Note that SA_NODELAY should -not- be used for normal device interrupts: (1) this will degrade both interrupt and scheduling latency and (2) SA_NODELAY interrupt handlers are much more difficult to code and maintain than are normal interrupt handlers. Use SA_NODELAY only for low-level interrupts (such as the timer tick) or for hardware interrupts that must be processed with extreme realtime latencies.

local_irq_enable()

local_irq_disable()

local_irq_save(flags)

local_irq_restore(flags)

irqs_disabled()

irqs_disabled_flags()

local_save_flags(flags)

The local_irq*() functions do not actually disable hardware interrupts, instead, they simply disable preemption. These are suitable for use with normal interrupts, but not for SA_NODELAY interrupt handlers.

However, it is usually even better to use locks (possibly per-CPU locks) instead of these functions for PREEMPT_RT environments -- but please also consider the effects on SMP machines using non-PREEMPT kernels!

raw_local_irq_enable()

raw_local_irq_disable()

raw_local_irq_save(flags)

raw_local_irq_restore(flags)

raw_irqs_disabled()

raw_irqs_disabled_flags()

raw_local_save_flags(flags)

These functions disable hardware interrupts, and are therefore suitable for use with SA_NODELAY interrupts such as the scheduler clock interrupt (which, among other things, invokes scheduler_tick()).

These functions are quite specialized, and should only be used in low-level code such as the scheduler, synchronization primitives, and so on. Keep in mind that you cannot acquire normal spinlock_t locks while under the effects of raw_local_irq*().

Miscellaneous

wait_for_timer()

Wait for the specified timer to expire. This is required because timers run in process in the PREEMPT_RT environment, and can therefore be preempted, and can also block, for example during spinlock_t acquisition.

smp_send_reschedule_allbutself()

Sends reschedule IPI to all other CPUs. This is used in the scheduler to quickly find another CPU to run a newly awakened realtime task that is high priority, but not sufficiently high priority to run on the current CPU. This capability is necessary to do the efficient global scheduling required for realtime. Non-realtime tasks continue to be scheduled in the traditional manner per-CPU manner, sacrificing some priority exactness for greater efficiency and scalability.

INIT_FS(name)

This now takes the name of the variable as an argument so that the internal rwlock_t can be properly initialized (given the need for priority inheritance).

local_irq_disable_nort()

local_irq_enable_nort()

local_irq_save_nort(flags)

local_irq_restore_nort(flags)

spin_lock_nort(lock)

spin_unlock_nort(lock)

spin_lock_bh_nort(lock)

spin_unlock_bh_nort(lock)

BUG_ON_NONRT()

WARN_ON_NONRT()

These do nothing (or almost nothing) in PREEMPT_RT, but have the normal effect in other environments. These primitives should not be used outside of low-level code (e.g., in the scheduler, synchronization primitives, or architecture-specific code).

spin_lock_rt(lock)

spin_unlock_rt(lock)

in_atomic_rt()

BUG_ON_RT()

WARN_ON_RT()

Conversely, these have the normal effect in PREEMPT_RT, but do nothing in other environments. Again, these primitives should not be used outside of low-level code (e.g., in the scheduler, synchronization primitives, or architecture-specific code).

smp_processor_id_rt(cpu)

This returns "cpu" in the PREEMPT_RT environment, but acts the same as smp_processor_id() in other environments. This is intended for use only in the slab allocator.

PREEMPT_RT configuration options

High-Level Preemption-Option Selection

• PREEMPT_NONE selects the traditional no-preemption case for server workloads.

• PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY enables voluntary preemption points, but not wholesale kernel preemption. This is intended for desktop use.

• PREEMPT_DESKTOP enables voluntary preemption points along with non-critical-section preemption (PREEMPT). This is intended for low-latency desktop use.

• PREEMPT_RT enables full preemption, including critical sections.

Feature-Selection Configuration Options

• PREEMPT enables non-critical-section kernel preemption.

• PREEMPT_BKL causes big-kernel-lock critical sections to be preemptible.

• PREEMPT_HARDIRQS causes hardirqs to run in process context, thus making them preemptible. However, the irqs marked as SA_NODELAY will continue to run in hardware interrupt context.

• PREEMPT_RCU causes RCU read-side critical sections to be preemptible.

• PREEMPT_SOFTIRQS causes softirqs to run in process context, thus making them preemptible.

Debugging Configuration Options

These are subject to change, but give a rough idea of the sorts of debug features available within PREEMPT_RT.

• CRITICAL_PREEMPT_TIMING measures the maximum time that the kernel spends with preemption disabled.

• CRITICAL_IRQSOFF_TIMING measures the maximum time that the kernel spends with hardware irqs disabled.

• DEBUG_IRQ_FLAGS causes the kernel to validate the "flags" argument to spin_unlock_irqrestore() and similar primitives.

• DEBUG_RT_LOCKING_MODE enables runtime switching of spinlocks from preemptible to non-preemptible. This is useful to kernel developers who want to evaluate the overhead of the PREEMPT_RT mechanisms.

• DETECT_SOFTLOCKUP causes the kernel to dump the current stack trace of any process that spends more than 10 seconds in the kernel without rescheduling.

• LATENCY_TRACE records function-call traces representing long-latency events. These traces may be read out of the kernel via /proc/latency_trace. It is possible to filter out low-latency traces via /proc/sys/kernel/preempt_thresh.

  This config option is extremely useful when tracking down excessive latencies.

• LPPTEST enables a device driver that performs parallel-port based latency measurements, such as used by Kristian Benoit for measurements posted on LKML in June 2005.

  Use scripts/testlpp.c to actually run this test.

• PRINTK_IGNORE_LOGLEVEL causes -all- printk() messages to be dumped to the console. Normally a very bad idea, but helpful when other debugging tools fail.

• RT_DEADLOCK_DETECT finds deadlock cycles.

• RTC_HISTOGRAM generates data for latency histograms for applications using /dev/rtc.

• WAKEUP_TIMING measures the maximum time from when a high-priority thread is awakened to the time it actually starts running in microseconds. The result is accessed from /proc/sys/kernel/wakeup_timing. and the test may be restarted via:

  	echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/preempt_max_latency
  

Some unintended side-effects of PREEMPT_RT

Because the PREEMPT_RT environment relies heavily on Linux being coded in an SMP-safe manner, use of PREEMPT_RT has flushed out a number of SMP bugs in the Linux kernel, including some timer deadlocks, lock omissions in ns83820_tx_timeout() and friends, an ACPI-idle scheduling latency bug, a core networking locking bug, and a number of preempt-off-needed bugs in the block IO statistics code.

Quick quiz answers

Quick Quiz #1: How can semaphore critical sections be preempted in a non-preemptible kernel?

Strictly speaking, preemption simply does not happen in a non-preemptible kernel (e.g., non-CONFIG_PREEMPT). However, roughly the same thing can occur due to things like page faults while accessing user data, as well as via explicit calls to the scheduler.

Quick Quiz #2: What is a simple and fast way to implement priority inheritance from writers to multiple readers?

If you come up with a way of doing this, I expect that Ingo Molnar will be very interested in learning about it. However, please check the LKML archives before getting too excited, as this problem is extremely non-trivial, there are no known solutions, and it has been discussed quite thoroughly. In particular, when thinking about writer-to-reader priority boosting, consider the case where a reader-writer lock is read-held by numerous readers, and each reader is blocked attempting to write-acquire some other reader-writer lock, each of which again is read-held by numerous readers. Of course, the time required to boost (then un-boost) all these readers counts against your scheduling latency.

Of course, one solution would be to convert the offending code sequences to use RCU. ;-) [Sorry, couldn't resist!!!]

Quick Quiz #3: Why can't event mechanisms use priority inheritance?

There is no way for Linux to figure out which task to boost. With sleeping locks, the task that acquired the semaphore would presumably be the task that will release it, so that is the task whose priority gets boosted. In contrast, with events, any task might do the down() that awakens the high-priority task.

[Thanks to Ingo Molnar for his thorough review of a previous draft of this document].

Comments (12 posted)

Patches and updates

Kernel trees

• Linus Torvalds: Linux-2.6.13-rc6: aic7xxx testers please... (August 7, 2005)

• Andrew Morton: 2.6.13-rc5-mm1. (August 8, 2005)

• Chris Wright: Linux 2.6.12.4. (August 5, 2005)

• Con Kolivas: 2.6.12-ck5. (August 8, 2005)

• Marcelo Tosatti: Linux 2.4.32-pre3. (August 9, 2005)

Core kernel code

• Paul E. McKenney: Use RCU to protect tasklist for unicast signals. (August 10, 2005)

Development tools

• Con Kolivas: Interbench 0.27. (August 5, 2005)

• Con Kolivas: Interbench 0.28. (August 8, 2005)

• Marty Ridgeway: August LTP now available. (August 5, 2005)

• Petr Baudis: Cogito-0.13. (August 5, 2005)

• Stephane Eranian: new perfmon2 kernel patch available. (August 8, 2005)

Device drivers

• Andy Fleming: Gianfar PHY Layer Update. (August 5, 2005)

• dmitry pervushin: spi. (August 8, 2005)

• Alex Aizman: open-iscsi/linux-iscsi-5 Initiator. (August 8, 2005)

• Todd Poynor: PowerOP 0/3: System power operating point management API. (August 9, 2005)

• Todd Poynor: PowerOP 1/3: PowerOP core. (August 9, 2005)

• Todd Poynor: PowerOP 2/3: Intel Centrino support. (August 9, 2005)

• Todd Poynor: PowerOP 3/3: Intel Centrino cpufreq integration. (August 10, 2005)

• Paul Mackerras: Add pci_walk_bus function to PCI core. (August 10, 2005)

• Alan Stern: Don't use a klist for drivers' set-of-devices. (August 10, 2005)

Filesystems and block I/O

• Dave Kleikamp: jfs update. (August 5, 2005)

• Hiroyuki Machida: Posix file attribute support on VFAT. (August 8, 2005)

• Janak Desai: New system call, unshare. (August 8, 2005)

Janitorial

• Christoph Hellwig: consolidate sys_ptrace. (August 10, 2005)

Memory management

• Adam Litke: Demand faulting for large pages. (August 5, 2005)

• Nick Piggin: mm: remove PageReserved. (August 8, 2005)

• Nick Piggin: mm: remap ZERO_PAGE mappings. (August 8, 2005)

• Nick Piggin: mm: core remove PageReserved. (August 8, 2005)

• Daniel Phillips: Net vm deadlock fix (take two). (August 8, 2005)

• Daniel Phillips: Net vm deadlock fix, version 5. (August 8, 2005)

• Rik van Riel: non-resident page tracking. (August 10, 2005)

• Yasunori Goto: gurantee DMA area for alloc_bootmem_low() ver. 2.. (August 10, 2005)

Networking

• Arnaldo Carvalho de Melo: ANNOUNCE: Linux DCCP implementation merged. (August 8, 2005)

Architecture-specific

• Con Kolivas: i386 No-Idle-Hz aka Dynamic-Ticks 5. (August 8, 2005)

Security-related

• David Madore: capabilities patch (v 0.1). (August 10, 2005)

• Evgeniy Polyakov: New asynchronous crypto subsystem [acrypto] release.. (August 10, 2005)

Miscellaneous

• Andrew Morton: kernel status, 4 Aug 2005. (August 5, 2005)

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