Re: 2.6.X, NPTL, SCHED_FIFO and JACK

[Ingo Molnar]

* Paul Davis <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The first and most visible issue is with inheritance of SCHED_FIFO
> scheduling. Although there are other mechanisms available under 2.6,
> many people use the "jackstart" helper application which runs setuid
> root and uses capabilities to start up JACK with the required caps to
> allow use of SCHED_FIFO and mlockall(). This has worked very well in
> 2.4 for about 2 years, but in 2.6 JACK fails to get its threads to be
> in the SCHED_FIFO scheduling class without a bunch of nasty kludges.
> 
> Things work correctly as soon as LD_ASSUME_KERNEL is used. 

A simple "strace -f" should show whether the setscheduler() call
succeeds or not. Does 'jackstart' do anything with glibc internals?

> We also see apparently impossible thread scheduling, where a thread
> that should run immediately is delayed by a significant time, and the
> thread that woke the first one up (and should be waiting for it to
> execute) runs again, apparently without ever having blocked. Once
> more, it all works correctly is LD_ASSUME_KERNEL is used to avoid
> NPTL.

there was a SCHED_FIFO bug in all 2.6 kernels prior 2.6.5, causing
erratic scheduling. Have you tried 2.6.6 or 2.6.7?

> Are there known issues with the implementation of NPTL that might give
> rise to this behaviour? What can we do to help understand and debug
> it?

there's nothing special about NPTL, scheduling-wise. But if SCHED_FIFO
is not properly set for all JACK threads that could explain the
symptoms. You talked about kludges that are necessary to make all
threads SCHED_FIFO - are you 100% sure that all JACK threads are indeed
SCHED_FIFO after these kludges are applied? If yes and you are running a
later kernel then it's something new and probably NPTL-unrelated.

	Ingo
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