libkse and SMP (was Re: USB bulk read & pthreads)

Terry Lambert tlambert2 at mindspring.com
Thu May 22 22:10:24 PDT 2003


Dan Nelson wrote:
> In the last episode (May 22), Terry Lambert said:
> > Make sure you use SCHED_4BSD, rather than SCHED_ULE, if you are using
> > one of the kernel threads libraries, for now.
> >
> > You really should read the -current archives before attempting any of
> > this, if you don't follow -current closely enough to have caught
> > Jeff's message on this, or which kernel threading libraries are
> > available.
> 
> I do read -current, and I'm definitely not going anywhere near
> SCHED_ULE.  I just tested both libraries with today's kernel and
> libraries, and was able to get a hard lockup with both libthr and
> libkse.  Mysql seems to run okay.  Starting a threaded pike process
> seems to be the killer.  Unfortunately, pike's a pretty large app so
> it's not easy to get a stripped-down testcase.

The philosophies behing libthr and libkse are different.  For
libthr, you basically have a FreeBSD version of Linux threads;
for libkse, there are some issues you have to deal with.

The first of these issues is that you have to add Daniel's patch
to the libkse scheduler code.  This is necessary because there is
a lot of threads code that is not completely compliant with the
POSIX standard: it makes assumptions which POSIX does not permit,
about what thread gets scheduled to run after an involuntary
context switch.  The original Netscape (e.g. 4.7) has this same
assumption, and Java interfaces that use image maps lock it up if
you move the mouse over the map while the GIF is loading.  If you
wait for it to load, there's no problem.  Mozilla has similar
assumptions.

The second of these is that the libkse model is M:N, with N being
defaulted to 1.  If you want more kernel threads, you have to ask
for them (and you aren't doing that).  In general, a lot of code
is going to assume for M:N that M==N; to get this, you will need
to create threads with an attribute other than the default of
"NULL", with the scope set to PTHREAD_SCOPE_SYSTEM.  You should
also look at the actual scheduler code in libkse to see if there
are any other requirements for creating KSEG's for KSE's for
user space threads (I haven't looked at it for several weeks now,
so I don't know if anything has changed, unless it was sent to
one of the mailing lists).

With both of these out of the way, libkse should work for you.

The libthr may not work for you due to scheduling order, or it
may not work for you because signals are not masked per process,
or it may not work if you have threads that depend on the
PTHREAD_SCOPE_PROCESS attribute (kernel threads like the Linux
model are inherently incapable of supporting this scope).

Basically, you'll have to play around a bit with it.

-- Terry


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