Hi Jan,

On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 16:11, Jan Kiszka 
> Is there anything in xenomai which depends more on or interfers with the 
> linux kernel than the lxrt scheduler does?

I don't think so, but I suspect that some portions of the nucleus
(basically the timer handler and the rescheduler) are more sensitive to
bus contention (maybe more data moved, more code to be fetched, more
cache-unaligned stuff, I don't know yet). Add to this that the nucleus
is a pure Adeos implementation, the hw interrupts are almost never
masked out, but only the Xenomai domain is stalled, which leaves room
for performance degradation if the primary IRQ handlers preempt
otherwise interrupt-free sections and need to fiddle with the x86
sluggish PIC in such situation, especially when we are talking about
50us latencies, and not ms level ones. LXRT happens to mask the IRQs at
hw level sometimes for internal reasons thus bypassing the pipeline for
a limited time. Maybe instrumenting the nucleus will prove that we must
prevent hw preemption in some rare but useful cases too.

Btw, unless I'm mistaken, Marc initially compared the LXRT-based
user/latency running with a 10Khz period with a fusion based one running
at 1Khz. This is not really fair: the more you allow Linux to trash the
cache with a higher sleep delay, the more latency you will get to
reinstate the test context. What would have been more appropriate is to
run the POSIX test at 10Khz too (if it does not break, I mean :o), or
downgrade the LXRT period to 1Khz.

>  What puzzles us is that the 
> hal (adeos), thus the interrupt shield, is identical...
> 

Which is basically good news, isn't it? I mean: there is hope :o) More
seriously, once the nucleus is stable with its new user-space support
(and it seems it is reaching this state now, since you did not
experiment any unbounded jitter), Gilles and I will focus on improving
the inherent latency. I just want to  clear all the stability issues
first. I'll try to reproduce higher jitters on other machines I can put
my hands on.

> Jan
> 
> 
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-- 

Philippe.


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