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.
HPET supports reading LAPIC counter without locks, so it can be done in
parallel. This makes booting much faster. Previously initializing every
timer took 100 ms, so 16 CPUs took total of 1.6 seconds. This allows
doing it all in 100 ms.
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.
Bananymous
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