Instances of lazy scheduling and timeslice donation in L4 implementations

[Sergio Ruocco]

Udo A. Steinberg wrote:
> On Tue, 24 Jan 2006 16:00:24 +1100 Sergio Ruocco (SR) wrote: SR> 
> Local experts believe that current L4 implementation(s) do not 
> conform SR> to specification, and Thread B will run only until the 
> next timertick.
> 

> Your local experts are correct. In the L4 implementations that I know
>  of B will only run on A's time slice until a higher-priority thread 
> preempts B. I think this is what you meant by "next timer tick" (but 
> note that the next timer tick may wake up a lower-priority thread 
> which does not preempt B - therefore, preemption is what ultimately 
> breaks the donation, not the timer tick per se).

Local experts said 'timertick', but they were busy with other things, so
we may want to take a close look at the source and/or ask what they
meant exactly. I also found the answer 'timertick' a bit strange, as I
would expect donation to be terminated only by:

1) natural end of augmented timeslice
2) preemption by higher-priority thread


> Btw., this is the exact same issue as the IPC donation we discussed a
>  few days ago - the kernel does not maintain enough information to 
> restore the donation to B when A's time slice is selected by the 
> scheduler again. - Udo

On the one hand, remember that according to the specification the part
of timeslice that A donated to B via L4_ThreadSwitch() *adds* to B's
natural timeslice, so the kernel should have provision for this
donation-preserving behaviour. Again, a close look to the source seems
necessary.

On the other hand, as Gernot pointed out, A's timeslice donation to B
when A IPCs to B is simply a *side* *effect* of lazy scheduling, a speed
optimisation that avoids to run the scheduler in the IPC path. Being the
timeslice donation a mere side-effect, actively carrying it over across
preemptions may probably not be the required behaviour.

	Sergio

-- 

--

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~sruocco/
ERTOS Researcher                                              Lecturer
National ICT Australia Ltd.              University of New South Wales

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