[Vm-dev] linux thread priorities

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Thu Feb 4 05:31:01 UTC 2010


On Wed, Feb 3, 2010 at 6:40 PM, Bert Freudenberg <bert at freudenbergs.de>wrote:

>
> On 03.02.2010, at 18:01, Eliot Miranda wrote:
> > Our sound processing depends on a high-prirority thread running for a
> short time every 20 milliseconds to push data through the sound processing
> paths (microphone recording, OpenAL for spatialization, and so on).  On
> linux this approach is not immediately applicable
>
> Scheduling in Linux sucked for a long time, only optimized for server work.
> Depending on the kernel your users have running it may still be totally
> unsuitable for anything multimedia. There was a big hubbub about that on
> LKML where the leading developers did not even acknowledge there was a
> problem with the scheduler. A rewritten scheduler demonstrated much better
> performance, but was not accepted as-is. Google for Con Kolivas to learn
> more. It supposedly has gotten better but only very recently.
>
> You need to find someone to talk to who knows this stuff, I'm only watching
> from afar. Here's the general idea:
>
> http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=185


Thanks Bert!  Plenty to investigate here, but building a special kernel is
something I didn't bargain for ;)


I think one interim solution to explore is to run the sound pump from the VM
thread in the VM's check for events code.  In the Cog VMs a 1KHz heartbeat
updates the wall clock and causes the VM to break out of native code and
check for events (ideally the heartbeat is a separate thread).  An
mentioned, on linux the heartbeat is a software signal from an interval
timer.  The software interrupt serves also to interrupt any system calls
(e.g. in relinquishProcessorForMilliseconds).  I can extend the heartbeat to
set a flag saying "run the sound pump" which will be checked by the VM when
checking for events and it will invoke the sound pump code.  The problem
here is that any long-running activities that aren't interruptable by the
software interrupt (OpenGL rendering?) will delay the sound pump.  So this
is either doomed to failure or might just work depending on those other
activities.  Comments?  Try it, waste of time?


>
> - Bert -
>
>
>
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