Re: [Xenomai-core] [RFC] shadow threads with prio 0 / SCHED_NORMAL

[Philippe Gerum <rpm@xenomai.org>]

Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote:
> Philippe Gerum wrote:
>  > Jan Kiszka wrote:
>  > > Hi,
>  > > 
>  > > this is an experimental hack to open the non-rt priority levels of Linux
>  > > to Xenomai shadow threads, i.e. allow shadows to be scheduled under
>  > > SCHED_NORMAL when in secondary mode. The scenario are typical borderline
>  > > threads between RT and non-RT: they share a critical code path with RT
>  > > threads, maybe mutex protected, but they are mostly time-sharing threads
>  > > which do not need SCHED_FIFO for this.
>  > > 
>  > > The patch (be careful, quick-hack!) addresses the prio level 0 in the
>  > > ipipe patch, the nucleus/shadow subsystem, and the native skin. A quick
>  > > test with the attached demo showed the expected behaviour so far: no
>  > > lock-up during busy-waiting in secondary mode, prio-boost when holding
>  > > the lock (visible via /proc/xenomai/sched), no obvious side effects.
>  > > 
>  > > Any comments? Does this break other things in a subtle way?
>  > 
>  > An initial comment on the general usage of this extension: since the 
>  > threads running in SCHED_OTHER/SCHED_NORMAL mode are expected to run 
>  > non-RT workloads while still being able to use the RT infrastructure for 
>  >   communicating with the rest of the RT system, I think that the best 
>  > places for creating such hybrids are in the rt_task_shadow (native skin) 
>  > and pthread_setschedparam (POSIX skin) calls, which would make it clear 
>  > that a regular Linux thread is involved [and as such needs to be created 
>  > by a normal call to pthread_create()], which also happens to benefit 
>  > from the RT infrastructure mainly for communication/sychronization purpose.
> 
> What about keeping SCHED_RR as the default scheduling policy and
> requiring users to manually select SCHED_NORMAL in thread creation
> attributes in order to create hybrid threads with pthread_create ?
> 

No objection a priori, but what would this buy us?

-- 

Philippe.