[Vm-dev] [OpenSmalltalk/opensmalltalk-vm] Provide control over VM messages (#275)

[Eliot Miranda]

Hi Fabio,

On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 1:26 PM, Fabio Niephaus <notifications at github.com>
wrote:

> Hi Eliot,
>
> Is there actual proof of issues caused by rtprio not raised correctly or
> is this more a precaution/speculation? smalltalkCI, for instance, builds
> hundreds of projects every week and we didn't see any problems when we
> switched from itimer to threaded VMs.
>

Absolutely.  The symptom is that when there is no idle time then the clock
does not advance and delays don't fire.  So for example,e, if you spawn a
process at userBackgroundPriority that simply loops, delays will not work.
Tis is because the VM thread is now always union and hence the heartbeat
thread, being at the same priority as the VM thread, never gets a chance to
run, and so the heartbeat gets disabled.

If your concern is that the error message itself may be in error, I assure
you that it is real, and it is reporting that on the system it is not
allowed to spawn threads at higher priority without taking special steps.
And indeed this is described in the source code and the error message.  It
really is there for good reason, not just because I'm anal about it ;-)


> The easiest fix here, obviously, would be to hide the note all-together
> and maybe add it to some sort of README.txt that ships alongside the
> binaries. Maybe it could be that simple?
>
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_,,,^..^,,,_
best, Eliot


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