Re: [patch, 2.6.11-rc2] sched: RLIMIT_RT_CPU_RATIO feature

From: Lee Revell
Date: Thu Jan 27 2005 - 15:09:22 EST


On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 23:15 -0600, Jack O'Quin wrote:
> >> > And finally, with rlimit support, is there any reason why lockup
> >> > detection and correction can't go into userspace? Even RT
> >> > throttling could probably be done in a userspace daemon.
> >>
> >> It can. But, doing it in the kernel is more efficient, and probably
> >> more reliable.
> >
> > Possibly. But the people who want a solution seem to be in a very
> > small minority, and I'm not sure how much you care about efficiency.
>
> I do care. The average overhead of running a watchdog daemon at max
> priority is tiny. But, its impact on worst-case trigger latencies is
> non-trivial and must be added to everything else in the RT subsystem.

Keep in mind that with the max RT prio rlimit solution audio systems
using JACK would not even need the external watchdog thread, because
JACK already has its own watchdog thread. I also like the max RT prio
rlimit approach with (optional) watchdog thread running as root because
it really seems to be the least intrusive out of several good solutions
to the problem and puts policy details (when to throttle an RT thread)
in userspace.

Lee

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