Re: Issue in PI boosting code in __sched_setscheduler

[Ronny Meeus]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 9:10 PM, Ronny Meeus <ronny.meeus@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm using a patched kernel I get from Monta-Vista, it is based on the
> 3.10 kernel with some RT patches.
> We ported an application from pSOS RTOS to Linux using the
> Xenomai-Mercury (=library to map pSOS task to POSIX threads).
>
> One of the patches applied to our kernel is:
> "[PATCH RT 3/4] sched: Consider pi boosting in setscheduler" (see
> https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/22/77).
> I see that the code is today also present in the mainline kernel (for
> example in 3.19).
>
> We have several threads running in the real-time priority domain.
> ThreadA: running at prio -33.
> ThreadB: running at prio -35.
>
> ThreadA obtains a PI protected mutex and continues to execute code in
> the critical section.
> ThreadB tries to obtain the same mutex and this makes the kernel boost
> the priority of ThreadA to -35.
>
> While holding the lock, ThreadA changes its priority to -99 to
> implement a critical section (Xenomai internals). After a short
> period, the latter critical section is left and the call to lower the
> priority to its original one (-33) is issued to the kernel.
>
> I would expect that at this moment the priority is lowered to -35
> since this is the priority of the thread waiting on the mutex (TheadB)
> but instead the priority is not changed and stays at -99. (Because of
> the patch mentioned before. The relevant part of the code is also
> copied below).
> Since the critical section takes rather long, we start to miss
> important events processed by higher priority threads.
>
> If I disable the code introduced by the patch, the events are not missed.
>
> My question about this behavior: According to me it is not correct to
> keep the thread at the higher priority and "assume" that the critical
> section will not take long anymore.
> In my opinion the only correct solution is to lower the priority of
> the calling thread to the highest prio of "the new-priority (-33)" and
> "the priority of the tasks waiting on the mutex (-35)".
>
> Thanks.
>
> Best regards,
> Ronny
>
>
> 3408 static int __sched_setscheduler(struct task_struct *p,
> 3409                                 const struct sched_attr *attr,
> 3410                                 bool user)
>
> 3596         /*
> 3597          * Special case for priority boosted tasks.
> 3598          *
> 3599          * If the new priority is lower or equal (user space view)
> 3600          * than the current (boosted) priority, we just store the new
> 3601          * normal parameters and do not touch the scheduler class and
> 3602          * the runqueue. This will be done when the task deboost
> 3603          * itself.
> 3604          */
> 3605         if (rt_mutex_check_prio(p, newprio)) {
> 3606                 __setscheduler_params(p, attr);
> 3607                 task_rq_unlock(rq, p, &flags);
> 3608                 return 0;
> 3609         }


Any help would be appreciated.
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