Dear L4Re experts,
We now have a couple projects in which we are going to be utilizing your OS, so I've been implementing and testing some of the basic functionality that we will need. Namely that would be message passing.... I've been using the Hello World QEMU example as my starting point and have created a number of processes that communicate via a pair of unidirectional channels with IPC and shared memory. One channel for messages coming in, one channel for messages going out. The sender does an IPC_CALL() when a message has been put into shared memory. The receiver completes an IPC_RECEIVE(), fetches the message, and then responds with the IPC_REPLY() to the original IPC_CALL(). It is all interrupt/event driven, no sleeping, no polling. It works. I've tested it for robustness and it behaves exactly as expected, with the exception of throughput.
I seem to be getting only 4000 messages per second. Or roughly 4 messages per millisecond. Now there are a couple malloc() and free() and condition_wait() and condition_signal()s going on as the events and messages get passed through the sender and receiver threads, but nothing (IMHO) that should slow things down too much. Messages are very small, like 50 bytes, as I'm really just trying to get a handle on basic overhead. So pretty much, yes, I'm beating the context-switching mechanisms to death...
My questions: Is this normal(ish) throughput for a single-core x86_64 QEMU system? Am I getting hit by a time-sliced scheduler issue and most of my CPU is being wasted? How do I switch to a different non-time-sliced scheduler? Thoughts on what I could try to improve throughput?
And lastly... We are going to be signing up for training soon... do you have a recommendation for a big beefy AMD-based linux laptop?
Thanks!
Richard H. Clark
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