Re: [RFC PATCH] swap-sched: schedule with dynamic dependency detection (2.6.12-rc3)

[Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org>]

On Sun, 8 May 2005 16:11, Haoqiang Zheng wrote:
> swap-sched is a patch that solves dynamic priority inversion problem.
>
> Run X at normal priority (nice 0) and keep the system really busy by
> running a lot of interactive jobs (with dynamic priority at 115), or
> simply run some CPU bound tasks at nice -10. Then start a mpeg player
> at a high priority (nice -20). What would you expect? In my machine,
> the mpeg player runs at poorly 4 frm/s. Why the tasks running at
> dynamic priorities of 115 can have such dramatic impact on the
> performance of mpeg player running at nice -20? What happens is the
> mpeg player often blocks to wait the normal priority X to render the
> frames. Without knowing such dependency between mpeg player and X, the
> existing Linux scheduler would select other tasks to run and thus
> results in poor video playback quality. This problem is generally
> known as priority inversion.
>
> Certainly, this very problem can be solved by setting the priority of
> X to nice -10 (like what Redhat etc. does). However, inter-process
> communication mechanisms like pipe, socket and signal etc. are widely
> used in modern applications, and thus the inter-process dependencies
> are everywhere in today's computer systems. It's not possible for a
> system administrator to find out all the dependencies and set the
> priorities properly. Obviously, we need a system that can dynamically
> detects the dependencies among the tasks and take the dependency
> information into account when scheduling. swap-sched is such a system.
>
> swap-sched consists of two components: the automatic dependency
> detection component and the dependency based scheduling
> component. swap-sched detects the dependency among tasks by
> monitoring/instrumenting the inter-process
> communication/synchronization related system calls. Since all the
> inter-process communications/synchronizations (except shared-memory)
> are done via system calls, the dynamic dependencies can be effectively
> detected by instrumenting these system calls.
>
> In a conventional CPU scheduler, a task is removed from the runqueue
> once it's blocked. This is a PROBLEM since a high priority task's
> request is ignored once it's blocked, even though it's blocked because
> of waiting for the execution of another task. Based on this
> observation, swap-sched solves the priority inversion problem by make
> two simple changes to the existing CPU scheduler. First, it keeps all
> the tasks that are blocked but depends on some other tasks that are
> runnable in runqueue. (We call such tasks are virtual runnable
> tasks). Second, the existing CPU scheduler is called as usual. But since
> the virtual runnable tasks are in runqueue, they may be scheduled. In this
> case the swap scheduler is called to choose one of the providers of the
> task (the task that the virtual runnable task depends on) to run.
>
>  Our results show that SWAP has low overhead, effectively solves the
> priority inversion problem and can provide substantial improvements in
> system performance in scheduling processes with dependencies. For the
> mpeg player + X scenario discussed above, mpeg player can play at 23
> frm/s with swap-sched enabled!!!
>
> Please visit our swap-sched project homepage at
> http://swap-sched.sourceforge.net/ for details and latest
> patches. Suggestions/Comments are welcomed.

Very interesting code. How do you prevent a ring of dependent tasks from 
DoSing the entire system? eg what happens with process_load in contest - 
since you asked about this recently I assume you have already tested it.

Cheers,
Con

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