KernelTrap - -rt

Quote: Sacrificing Performance To Achieve Determinism

Jeremy — Wed, 21 May 2008 21:38:01 +0000

"An RTOS (Real-time Operating System) will sacrifice performance to achieve determinism (low latencies). Several key features to an RT system usually come with a performance cost. A non RT system will perform 99% of the time faster than an RTOS. But all it takes is that one time to miss a deadline to make an RT system crash.

Quote: Largest Performance Improvement To Hit The RT Patch

Jeremy — Tue, 20 May 2008 13:16:44 +0000

"This is the largest performance improvement to hit the RT patch since the removal of the global PI lock. On my 4way box running 'hackbench 50' went from 18 seconds down to just under 5 seconds (4.8). Vanilla 2.6.24.7 on this same box runs at 3.9 secs. This is the first time that the RT patched kernel is less than a magnitude away from mainline running this hackbench test."

Preemptible RCU

Jeremy — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 16:45:33 +0000

"This patch implements a new version of RCU which allows its read-side critical sections to be preempted," Paul McKenney said in a posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He described the RCU code contained in his 9 part patchset, "it uses a set of counter pairs to keep track of the read-side critical sections and flips them when all tasks exit [the] read-side critical section." He continued:

"This patch was developed as a part of the -rt kernel development and meant to provide better latencies when read-side critical sections of RCU don't disable preemption. As a consequence of keeping track of RCU readers, the readers have a slight overhead (optimizations in the paper). This implementation co-exists with the 'classic' RCU implementations and can be switched to at compiler."

Ingo Molnar responded very favorably to the patch, "cool! Now after 2 years of development and testing I think this is one of the most mature patchsets on lkml - so i'd like to see this designated for potential upstream inclusion. I.e. everyone who can see some bug, please holler now."