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[20080508] More kernel works: preemption and realtime, devfs, modules, testing
The following kernel-related projects were raised in the past few weeks:
  • Kernel Preemption: Andrew Doran has continued his work towards fine-grained locking, and he has proposed a patch to implement kernel preemption, i.e. that in a realtime environment, high-priority processes can interrupt system calls running inside the kernel.

    Handling the Floating Point Unit (FPU) was added later on -- the FPU needs special attention as saving and restoring is expensive, and doesn't need to be done in many cases. But if a program uses it, care must be taken to handle the case. The exact handling is explained by Christoph Egger.

    While there, Christoph also outlined the roadmap for getting realtime support in NetBSD - there are still a number of bits missing, but being able to preempt the kernel is a good first step!

  • Fine-grained socket locking: In order to allow fine-grained locking (instead of blocking all other processes from entering the kernel, as is done in the "biglock" SMP approach), many kernel subsystems need to be changed. The socket system is the core part of interprocess communication, and Andrew Doran has changed it to use fine-grained locking now.

    In that context, the question of what code still runs with the biglock held, and Andrew gave an overview where more work is needed: some file systems (lfs, ext2fs, nfs), most of the drivers, protocols like TCP/IP, Veriexec, and some machine-dependent parts.

    Veriexec-Hacker Brett Lymn added details on the status of Veriexec with respect to its transition towards fine-grained locking.

  • Kernel modules and ramdisk: A change in kernel modules was proposed some time ago, and Andrew Doran has used this scheme now to unify the way many ports handle the install media: There, the kernel loaded contains a ramdisk (miniroot) image inside the kernel, which is then used as root-filesystem for the kernel, containing the install tools.

    In order to split things and eventually use a stock GENERIC kernel for both running and installing, Andy has changed the x86 boot process to load the miniroot as a kernel module.

    When booting it may be useful to select one of several ramdisks: one for installing, and one for resuing the system, For this, the recently introduced boot.cfg file was extended to handle kernel modules in the boot menu.

    Izumi Tsutsui has made an ISO with all changes for testing available.

  • Device File System (devfs): Another area of the kernel where a lot of work is currently being done by Matt Fleming is NetBSD's device driver infrastructure, esp. under aspects of dynamic attaching, detaching, and suspending (power management!). To talk to the various drivers, device nodes in the /dev directory are kept right now, but those are static and need to be updated when a new driver is added. Matt is working on a Device Filesystem (devfs) that dynamically created /dev from the list of devices inside the kernel. The fileysstem will also handle dynamic creation and deletion of nodes, and as an important case it will also keep permissions across reboots, if someone changes permissions manually.

    The work is at a very mature point right now and needs some testing - see Matt's mail to the tech-kern list for more information!

  • Testing driver attachment: While talking about testing of device drivers, David Young has reminded driver developers to test individual drivers' detachment and re-attachment, suspension and resumption after changes. He has also posted a how-to for those tests, using drvctl(8). (The manpage needs some updating, sorry -- UTSL :-)


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[20060330] Announcement: AMD64 gains real-time BSD SMP
From a Linuxdevices article: `` FSMLabs announced Wednesday that it is shipping SMP (symmetric multi-processing) support for AMD's 64-bit Dual-Core Opteron processors running a real-time extension to BSD Unix. The company announced similar Linux support last summer, and says it has already supplied the BSD version of RTCore to network equipment providers (NEPs).

According to FSMLabs, RTCore implements a "host" environment for reliable, real-time operations, while either BSD or Linux function as "guests" OSes. In the case of BSD, RTCoreBSD implements a hard real-time POSIX 1003.13 supervisory kernel with NetBSD 3.0 serving as the guest OS. For Linux, the RTCore kernel works in conjunction with a Linux guest OS, instead of BSD.

RTCore first supported BSD kernels in May, 2002. RTCore's AMD64 support, implemented for Linux in July, can be used with AMD Opteron, Athlon 64, and Turion 64 chips.''

NetBSD 3.0/amd64 with no realtime support can be found here for free. :-)

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[20050901] Real-Time Audio Servers on BSD Unix Derivatives
As mentioned on Undeadly.org, Juha Erkkilä has managed to bring the topics of real-time processing in operating systems and audio servers together in his master's thesis "Real-Time Audio Servers on BSD Unix Derivatives": `` This paper covers real-time and interprocess communication features of 4.4BSD Unix derived operating systems, and especially their applicability for real-time audio servers. The research ground of bringing real-time properties to traditional Unix operating systems (such as 4.4BSD) is covered. Included are some design ideas used in BSD-variants, such as using multithreaded kernels, and schedulers that can provide real-time guarantees to processes. Factors affecting the design of real-time audio servers are considered, especially the suitability of various interprocess communication facilities as mechanisms to pass audio data between applications. ''. The thesis then describes how to implement things for OpenBSD, but it may still be of interest to NetBSD to some extent. [more]

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[20050404] Realtime?
A question about "hard" realtime scheduling was asked on tech-kern, and in addition to various heavy-weight approaches like kernel- and scheduler-tuning, Soda Noriyuki made an interesting light-weight suggestion of using a high-priority interrupt handler. An example is also given in the ISA serial (com) driver.

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