If the processor has invariant TSC it can be used to measure time. We
keep track of the last nanosecond and TSC values and offset them based
on the current TSC. This allows getting current time in userspace.
The implementation maps a single RO page to every processes' address
space. The page contains the TSC info which gets updated every 100 ms.
If the processor does not have invariant TSC, this page will not
indicate the capability for TSC based timing.
There was the problem about how does a processor know which cpu it is
running without doing syscall. TSC counters may or may not be
synchronized between cores, so we need a separate TSC info for each
processor. I ended up adding sequence of bytes 0..255 at the start of
the shared page. When a scheduler gets a new thread, it updates the
threads gs/fs segment to point to the byte corresponding to the current
cpu.
This TSC based timing is also used in kernel. With 64 bit HPET this
probably does not bring much of a benefit, but on PIT or 32 bit HPET
this removes the need to aquire a spinlock to get the current time.
This change does force the userspace to not use gs/fs themselves and
they are both now reserved. Other one is used for TLS (this can be
technically used if user does not call libc code) and the other for
the current processor index (cannot be used as kernel unconditionally
resets it after each load balance).
I was looking at how many times timer's current time was polled
(userspace and kernel combined). When idling in window manager, it was
around 8k times/s. When running doom it peaked at over 1 million times
per second when loading and settled at ~30k times/s.
Before this real hardware failed to boot with smp enabled. Allocating
the idle thread does a page mapping which ends up broadcasting TLB
shootdown to other processes. This ends up failing somewhere halting the
processors never allowing them to initialize their scheduler
This moves processor array to .bss reducing data size by 8192 bytes :)
This needed GCC updated to 15.2.0 because of an internal compiler error
I found :)
This event is sent when user presses ctrl+{F1-F12} and it will dump the
corresponding processor's stack trace. This is really helpful for
detecting deadlocks in the system
Kernel now makes sure thread is not holding any spinlocks when it tries
to lock a mutex or yield. Spinlocks are supposed to be only used for
short times without the possibility of yielding
I had not understood how MSIs work and I was unnecessarily routing them
through IOAPIC. This is not necessary and should not be done :D
Also MSIs were reserving interrupts that IOAPIC was capable of
generating. Now IOAPIC and MSIs use different set of interrupts so
IOAPIC can use more interrupts if needed.
This makes scheduler preemption much cleaner as bsb does not have to
send smp messages to notify other processes about timer interrupt.
Also PIT percision is now "full" 0.8 us instead of 1 ms that I was using
before.
Change Semaphore -> ThreadBlocker
This was not a semaphore, I just named it one because I didn't know
what semaphore was. I have meant to change this sooner, but it was in
no way urgent :D
Implement SMP events. Processors can now be sent SMP events through
IPIs. SMP events can be sent either to a single processor or broadcasted
to every processor.
PageTable::{map_page,map_range,unmap_page,unmap_range}() now send SMP
event to invalidate TLB caches for the changed pages.
Scheduler no longer uses a global run queue. Each processor has its own
scheduler that keeps track of the load on the processor. Once every
second schedulers do load balancing. Schedulers have no access to other
processors' schedulers, they just see approximate loads. If scheduler
decides that it has too much load, it will send a thread to another
processor through a SMP event.
Schedulers are currently run using the timer interrupt on BSB. This
should be not the case, and each processor should use its LAPIC timer
for interrupts. There is no reason to broadcast SMP event to all
processors when BSB gets timer interrupt.
Old scheduler only achieved 20% idle load on qemu. That was probably a
very inefficient implementation. This new scheduler seems to average
around 1% idle load. This is much closer to what I would expect. On my
own laptop idle load seems to be only around 0.5% on each processor.
Current context saving was very hacky and dependant on compiler
behaviour that was not consistent. Now we always use iret for
context saving. This makes everything more clean.
This is achieved by rewriting some inline assembly and changing
ProcessorID to be 32 bit value. For some reason if processor id
is 8 bits gcc runs out of 8 bit registers on i386.
This allows us to allocate processor stacks, and other per processor
structures dynamically in runtime. Giving processor stack to
ap_trampoline feels super hacky, but it works for now.
Bananymous