Re: [Xenomai] Dedicated Core?

[Charles Steinkuehler <charles@steinkuehler.net>]

On 3/30/2014 4:41 PM, Gilles Chanteperdrix wrote:
> 
> First, the imx6 is reported to have high latencies, and it is mostly due
> to cache effects, so isolating the cpus will not help.
> 
> Second, I would say relying on low user-space latencies to do in
> user-space things that the kernel should do is a bad design. You would
> have better success implementing the step motor control low level
> details as a kernel driver, and only move the high level stuff in
> user-space.

I am not looking to migrate something that should be a kernel service,
instead I'm trying to replace having dedicated hardware.

>> If it would be possible to simply keep a thread running full-time on one
>> core, I could get really good step/direction performance without having
>> to worry about interrupt latency, but I don't know if there's an (easy)
>> way to do this using Xenomai, or if the 'dedicated' core would still be
>> subject to hardware interrupts and if my running thread might be
>> occasionally migrated to other physical cores.
> 
> The latency you get in user-spâce are not interrupt latency, but
> user-space scheduling latencies, which are significantly higher. See the
> difference between latency -t 0 and latency -t 2 on your plaforms. If
> you want to only depend on interrupt latencies, you should implement a
> driver, and get user-space to interact with the driver.
> 
> As you may have already read on this list, Xenomai never migrates task
> automatically, and you can change the task affinity to define on which
> core it should run. That said, you probably want the processor to remain
> interrupt triggered, and the real-time task to suspend from time to time
> to let linux do its duty (like handling Linux domain timer interrupts).

We already have hooks to set processor affinity.  What I am interested
in is if I dedicate an entire core to running a tight code loop, can I
avoid Xenomai and/or Linux "pulling the core out from under me" as a
result of various hardware interrupts or general task scheduling?

I can live with the code not running for the duration of the Xenomai
interrupt handler (that's happening now anyway), I just want to know if
it is (easy) to keep Xenomai and Linux from grabbing the core running my
tight loop after the interrupt event.  It's similar to having one core
running "bare metal" code, but I actually need Linux and Xenomai to
manage setting up the shared memory regions used for IPC prior to
launching my code.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles@steinkuehler.net

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