* Mathieu Desnoyers (mathieu.desnoyers@polymtl.ca) wrote:
[...]
quoted text
> The problem of this approach wrt RT kernels is that we cannot provide
> enough "priority groups" (current irq, softirq and threads in mainline
> kernel) for all the subtile priority levels of RT kernels. The more
> groups we add, the less threads we allow on the system.
> 
> So basically, the relationship between the max number of threads (T) and
> the number of reader priorities goes as follow on a 64 bits machine :
> 
> T writers subscribed count bits
> 1 bit for writer mutex
> 
> for first priority group :
> T reader count bits
> (no need of reader exclusion bit because the writer subscribed count
> bits and the writer mutex act as exclusion)
> 
> for each other priority group :
> T reader count bits
> 1 reader exclusion bit (set by the writer)
> 
> We have the inequality :
> 
> 64 >= (T + 1) + T + (NR_PRIORITIES - 1) * (T + 1)
> 
> 64 >= (2T + 1) + (NR_PRIORITIES - 1) * (T + 1)
> 63 - 2T >= (NR_PRIORITIES - 1) * (T + 1)
> ((63 - 2T) / (T + 1)) + 1 >= NR_PRIORITIES
> 
> Therefore :
> 
> Thread bits  |  Max number of threads  |  Number of priorities
>   31         |    2147483648           |          1
>   20         |       1048576           |          2
>   15         |         32768           |          3
>   12         |          4096           |          4
>    9         |           512           |          5
>    8         |           256           |          6
>    7         |           128           |          7
>    6         |            64           |          8
>    5         |            32           |          9
>    4         |            16           |         10
>    3         |             8           |         15
> 
> Starting from here, we have more priority groups than threads in the
> system, which becomes somewhat pointless... :)
> 
> So currently, for the mainline kernel, I chose 3 priority levels thread,
> softirq, irq), which gives me 32768 max CPU in the system because I
> choose to disable preemption. However, we can think of ways to tune that
> in the direction we prefer. We could also hybrid those : having more
> bits for some groups which have preemptable threads (for which we need
> a max. of nr. threads) and less bits for other groups where preemption
> is disabled (where we only need enough bits to cound NR_CPUS)
> 
> Ideas are welcome...
> 
> 

It strikes me that Intel has a nice (probably slow?) cmpxchg16b
instruction on x86_64. Therefore, we could atomically update 128 bits,
which gives the following table :

((127 - 2T) / (T + 1)) + 1 >= NR_PRIORITIES

Thread bits  |  Max number of threads  |  Number of priorities
63           |            2^63         |            1
42           |            2^42         |            2
31           |            2^31         |            3
24           |            2^24         |            4
20           |            2^20         |            5
17           |          131072         |            6
15           |           32768         |            7
13           |            8192         |            8
11           |            2048         |            9
10           |            1024         |           10
9            |             512         |           11
8            |             256         |           13
7            |             128         |           15
6            |              64         |           17
5            |              32         |           20
4            |              16         |           24

.. where we have more priorities than threads.

So I wonder if having in the surrounding of 10 priorities, which could
dynamically adapt the number of threads to the number of priorities
available, could be interesting for the RT kernel ?

That would however depend on the very architecture-specific cmpxchg16b.

Mathieu

-- 
Mathieu Desnoyers
OpenPGP key fingerprint: 8CD5 52C3 8E3C 4140 715F  BA06 3F25 A8FE 3BAE 9A68
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