Re: RT patch acceptance

[Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au>]

Ingo Molnar wrote:

Thanks Ingo,

> * Nick Piggin <nickpiggin@yahoo.com.au> wrote:
>
>
> > Presumably your RT tasks are going to want to do some kind of *real* 
> > work somewhere along the line - so how is that work provided 
> > guarantees?
>
>
> there are several layers to this. The primary guarantee we can offer is
> to execute userspace code within N usecs. Most code that needs hard
> guarantees is quite simple and uses orthogonal mechanisms.

Well yes, but *somewhere* along the line they'll need to interact
with something else in a timely (in the RT sense) manner?

[...]

> > So in that sense, if you do hard RT in the Linux kernel, it surely is 
> > always going to be some subset of operations, dependant on exact 
> > locking implementation, other tasks running and resource usage, right?
>
>
> yes. The goal is that latencies will fundamentally depend on what 
> facilities (and sharing) the RT task makes use of - instead of depending 
> on what _other_ tasks do in the system.

OK.

> > Tasklist lock might be a good example off the top of my head - so you 
> > may be able to send a signal to another process with deterministic 
> > latency, however that latency might look something like: x + nrproc*y
>
>
> yes, signals are not O(1).
>
> Fundamentally, the Linux kernel constantly moves towards separation of 
> unrelated functionality, for scalability reasons. So the moment there's 
> some unexpected sharing, we try to get to rid of it not primarily due to 
> latencies, but due to performance. (and vice versa - one reason why it's 
> not hard to get latency patches into the kernel) E.g. the tasklist lock 
> might be convered to RCU one day. The idea is that a 'perfectly
> scalable' Linux kernel also has perfect latencies - the two goals meet.

I'd have to think about that one ;)
But yeah I agree they seem to broadly move in the same direction,
but let's not split hairs.

> > It appears to me (uneducated bystander, remember) that a nanokernel 
> > running a small hard-rt kernel and Linux together might be "better" 
> > for people that want real realtime.
>
>
> If your application model can tolerate a total separation of OSs then 
> that's sure a viable way. If you want to do everything under one 
> instance of Linux, and want to separate out some well-controlled RT 
> functionality, then PREEMPT_RT is good for you.
>
> Note that if you can tolerate separation of OSs (i.e. no sharing or 
> well-controlled sharing) then you can do that under PREEMPT_RT too, here 
> and today: e.g. run all the non-RT tasks in an UML or QEMU instance.
> (separation of UML needs more work but it's fundamentally ok.) Or you
> can use PREEMPT_RT as the nanokernel [although this sure is overkill]
> and put all the RT functionality into a virtual machine. So instead of a
> hard choice forced upon you, virtualization becomes an option. Soft-RT
> applications can morph towards hard-RT conditions and vice versa.

OK. I what sort of applications can't tolerate the nanokernel type
separation? I guess the hosts would be seperated by some network like
device, shared memory, etc. devices that use functionality provided
by the nanokernel?

> So whether it's good enough will have to be seen - maybe nanokernels
> will win in the end. As long as PREEMPT_RT does not impose any undue
> design burden on the stock kernel (and i believe it does not) it's a
> win-win situation: latency improvements will drive scalability,
> scalability improvements will drive latencies, and the code can be
> easily removed if it becomes unused.

Well yeah, from what I gather, the PREEMPT_RT work needn't be excluded
on the basis that it can't provide hard-RT - for a real world example
all the sound guys seem to love it ;) so it obviously is worth something.

And if the complexity can be nicely hidden away and configured out,
then I personally don't have any problem with it whatsoever :) But
I don't like to comment further on actual code until I see the actual
proposed patch when you're happy with it.

Nick
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