Paul McKenney of the IBM Linux Technology Center will be visiting IBM's Haifa Research Lab on May 3rd and giving a talk. I highly recommend attending - Paul's talks are insightful and entertaining, and it's a very interesting subject, IMENHO.
For those who want to attend, this is a regular HRL seminar, so there's no need to contact me in advance. the seminars are open to the public. IBM Haifa Research Labs are located on the Haifa University campus, Mt. Carmel. Parking will be available only for those who reserve a place by calling 04 - 8296100 at least one day in advance. Be sure to bring a valid picture ID, to be presented at reception. Contact me if you have any questions. Title: Towards Hard Realtime Response from the Linux Kernel: Adapting RCU to Hard Realtime Speaker: Paul McKenney, IBM Beaverton, Oregon May 3rd, 11:00 - 12:00, IBM Haifa Labs Auditorium, Haifa University Campus Traditionally, realtime response has been designed into operating systems offering it. Retrofitting hard realtime response into an existing general-purpose OS is not impossible, but is quite difficult: all non-preemptive code paths in the OS must have deterministic execution time. Realtime capabilities are nonetheless being added to Linux: the preemptible-kernel facility added to the 2.6 kernel enables surprisingly good soft realtime, and Ingo Molnar's CONFIG_PREEMPT_RT patch is producing amazing results: 1-microsecond average scheduling latency with 20-microsecond measured maximum latency. This is still soft realtime, but it is good enough for all but the most demanding applications. Other approaches have been proposed, and are summarized in this talk. The advent of aggressively multithreaded CPUs and multi-core dies brings a new challenge: can Linux offer realtime response on multiprocessor systems? In the past, one obstacle to realtime response on SMP systems has been RCU, which disables preemption throughout read-side critical sections. In addition, RCU's deferral of freeing can cause problems for memory-constrained systems. This talk describes some novel implementations of RCU that address these problems while still permitting reasonable performance and scalability. -- Muli Ben-Yehuda http://www.mulix.org | http://mulix.livejournal.com/
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