Overview
This patch reworks the handling of POSIX CPU timers, including the
ITIMER_PROF, ITIMER_VIRT timers and rlimit handling. It was put together
with the help of Roland McGrath, the owner and original writer of this code.
The problem we ran into, and the reason for this rework, has to do with using
a profiling timer in a process with a large number of threads. It appears
that the performance of the old implementation of run_posix_cpu_timers() was
at least O(n*3) (where "n" is the number of threads in a process) or worse.
Everything is fine with an increasing number of threads until the time taken
for that routine to run becomes the same as or greater than the tick time, at
which point things degrade rather quickly.
This patch fixes bug 9906, "Weird hang with NPTL and SIGPROF." And thanks
very much to Roland McGrath, without whom this patch wouldn't exist in this
form.
Code Changes
This rework corrects the implementation of run_posix_cpu_timers() to make it
run in constant time for a particular machine. (Performance may vary between
one machine and another depending upon whether the kernel is built as single-
or multiprocessor and, in the latter case, depending upon the number of
running processors.) To do this, at each tick we now update fields in
signal_struct as well as task_struct. The run_posix_cpu_timers() function
uses those fields to make its decisions.
We define a new structure, "task_cputime," to contain user, system and
scheduler times and use these in appropriate places:
struct task_cputime {
cputime_t utime;
cputime_t stime;
unsigned long long sum_exec_runtime;
};
This is included in the structure "thread_group_cputime," which is a new
substructure of signal_struct and which varies for uniprocessor versus
multiprocessor kernels. For uniprocessor kernels, it uses "task_cputime" as
a simple substructure, while for multiprocessor kernels it is a pointer:
struct thread_group_cputime {
struct task_cputime totals;
};
struct ...
