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

[Haoqiang Zheng <haoqiang@gmail.com>]

I am not quite sure about what do you mean for " a ring of dependent
tasks".  Do you mean the situation that A depends on B while at the
same time B depends on A?  It shouldn't happen since in swap-sched,
the dependency is generated on the fly. Task A depends on B only when
A blocks on waiting for B. For example, if task A blocks on
"read(pipe_fd,...)" and B is the task that can do
"write(pipe_fd,...)", then A is depending on B.  Once A is waked up,  
 A no longer depends on any other task. So the "ring of dependent
tasks" shouldn't happen, otherwise it's a deadlock.

Haoqiang

On 5/8/05, Con Kolivas <kernel@kolivas.org> wrote:
> 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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