Deterministic scheduling with local APIC

[Jacob Gorm Hansen]

On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 17:16, Jacob Gorm Hansen wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 16:06, Josh English wrote:
> 
> What I meant by 'deterministic' is just that all threads always get
> their full time slice. For this to happen a means of determining upon
> the arrival of an interrupt exactly how many cycles the running thread
> has left of its slice, and a means of granting it precisely this number
> of cycles before it gets preempted, is needed. I suppose you could use
> the TSC for the former and perhaps the local APIC for the latter, but I
> am unsure if trying to do so would be crazy.
> 
> > Well, unless you are building systems to withstand nuclear
> > attack or something.  So, if you want to write the code, I
> > think that your system would work provided your 'master'
> > scheduling mechanism resides above the kernel scheduler.
> > I think that this would prevent race conditions from
> > forming becuase hardware delays would be invisible to the
> > kernel at that point.

It seems my idea is similar to the HP Hypervisor project by Bressoud and
Schneider (1996). However, their effort benefited from the presence of a
'recovery register' on the PA-RISC. This register counts completed
instructions rather than cycles, and allows you to implement
deterministic scheduling (though that is not their exact approach). I
cannot find info on a similar register in P3 or P4, does anyone know if
it exists? If not, is anyone aware of other modern CPUs which sport such
a register? My guess is that the Itanium might have one due to its
PA-RISC heritage.

I am afraid that just relying on the TSC will lead to unpredictable
results on a modern CPU.

Best,
Jacob