Re: Question regarding kernel threads and userlevel

Re: Question regarding kernel threads and userlevel

[Anton Altaparmakov]

At 01:42 28/04/2001, Steffen Persvold wrote:
>I have a question regarding kernel threads : Are kernel threads treated 
>equally in terms of scheduling as normal userlevel processes ??

I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but I would think that 
kernel threads are treated the same as the kernel, i.e. they are not 
pre-emptied unless you call schedule yourself or you sleep.

>kernel thread gets scheduled and tries to get the same lock it will 
>deadlock because the userlevel process never gets back control and 
>releases the lock.

It never gets pre-emptied according to the above so it would spin for ever. 
You would need a SMP system which would be running the user space code on a 
second CPU to unlock again. (And if your kernel thread is holding any other 
locks which the user mode thread will take along it's kernel code path you 
will deadlock, too.)

If my suggestion above is correct then you can fix this by doing:

while (!spin_trylock())
         schedule();

Which will forcefully schedule to allow your processes to run and you know 
that as soon as you drop out of the loop you are holding the lock. If you 
want you could also add in a counter a display a warning or something if 
you don't manage to acquire a lock after several tries, perhaps just for 
debugging purposes.

Best regards,

         Anton


-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/

Question regarding kernel threads and userlevel

[Steffen Persvold]

Hi linux-kernel,

I have a question regarding kernel threads : Are kernel threads treated equally
in terms of scheduling as normal userlevel processes ??

In my test case I have a driver for a PCI card from which I want to control
access to it's memory (prefetchable PCI space). Userlevel processes can mmap
this PCI memory and write directly to it (via the nopage technique). This is
also possible from the kernel thread, but to avoid trashing and short bursts on
the PCI bus, I protect every access to the memory space with a spin lock (a
mmapped kernel memory page which the driver initializes). That means if you
have a SMP system and two userlevel processes wants to write to this memory,
one will have to wait for the other before doing the memcpy (yep I'm using what
you can call PIO). This works great for two userlevel processes.

Now the reason for my question is; if also I have a kernel thread wanting to
write to this memory space it will also have to wait for the same lock (though
not mmapped since we are already in kernel space and can access the lock page
directly). What happens, is that if a userlevel process holds this lock and the
kernel thread gets scheduled and tries to get the same lock it will deadlock
because the userlevel process never gets back control and releases the lock
(kinda like when you spinlock in interrupt level on a lock wich is locked
without spinlock_irq). Is this because the kernel thread has higher priority
than the user level process (it has a nice level of -20) ?

Best regards,
-- 
 Steffen Persvold                        Systems Engineer
 Email  : mailto:sp@scali.com            Scali AS (http://www.scali.com)
 Norway : Tel  : (+47) 2262 8950         Olaf Helsets vei 6
          Fax  : (+47) 2262 8951         N-0621 Oslo, Norway

 USA    : Tel  : (+1) 713 706 0544       10500 Richmond Avenue, Suite 190
                                         Houston, Texas 77042, USA

Re: Question regarding kernel threads and userlevel

[Anton Altaparmakov]

At 09:32 28/04/2001, Anton Altaparmakov wrote:
>At 01:42 28/04/2001, Steffen Persvold wrote:
>>I have a question regarding kernel threads : Are kernel threads treated 
>>equally in terms of scheduling as normal userlevel processes ??
>
>I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong but I would think that 
>kernel threads are treated the same as the kernel, i.e. they are not 
>pre-emptied unless you call schedule yourself or you sleep.
>
>>kernel thread gets scheduled and tries to get the same lock it will 
>>deadlock because the userlevel process never gets back control and 
>>releases the lock.
>
>It never gets pre-emptied according to the above so it would spin for 
>ever. You would need a SMP system which would be running the user space 
>code on a second CPU to unlock again. (And if your kernel thread is 
>holding any other locks which the user mode thread will take along it's 
>kernel code path you will deadlock, too.)
>
>If my suggestion above is correct then you can fix this by doing:
>
>while (!spin_trylock())
>         schedule();

Obviously dropping any other locks you hold onto before the schedule() and 
reacquiring them afterwards... Or you will probably deadlock anyway.

Anton


>Which will forcefully schedule to allow your processes to run and you know 
>that as soon as you drop out of the loop you are holding the lock. If you 
>want you could also add in a counter a display a warning or something if 
>you don't manage to acquire a lock after several tries, perhaps just for 
>debugging purposes.
>
>Best regards,
>
>         Anton
>
>
>--
>Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
>Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
>ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/
>
>-
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-- 
Anton Altaparmakov <aia21 at cam.ac.uk> (replace at with @)
Linux NTFS Maintainer / WWW: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linux-ntfs/
ICQ: 8561279 / WWW: http://www-stu.christs.cam.ac.uk/~aia21/

How to time in Kernel

[Srinivasan Venkatraman]

Hi, 

 I am trying to time a portion of code inside the kernel. How do I do it?
Can I use do_gettimeofday ? or do_getitimer ? Any leads will be
appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
-Srini.

RE: How to time in Kernel

[David Schwartz]

>  I am trying to time a portion of code inside the kernel. How do I do it?
> Can I use do_gettimeofday ? or do_getitimer ? Any leads will be
> appreciated.

	If this is for personal debugging use only and you have a Pentium or better
x86 processor, I recommend reading the TSC directly. 'msr.h' (in the
asm-i386 include directory) include 'rdtsc' and friends.

	DS