Soft Real Time Linux Scheduling

Question

I have a project with some soft real-time requirements. I have two processes (programs that I've written) that do some data acquisition. In either case, I need to continuously read in data that's coming in and process it.

The first program is heavily threaded, and the second one uses a library which should be threaded, but I have no clue what's going on under the hood. Each program is executed by the user and (by default) I see each with a priority of 20 and a nice value of 0. Each program uses roughly 30% of the CPU.

As it stands, both processes have to contended with a few background processes, and I want to give my two programs the best shot at the CPU as possible. My main issue is that I have a device that I talk to that has a 64 byte hardware buffer, and if I don't read from it in time, I get an overflow. I have noted this condition occurring once every 2-3 hours of run time.

Based on my research (http://oreilly.com/catalog/linuxkernel/chapter/ch10.html) there appear to be three ways of playing around with the priority:

1. Set the nice value to a lower number, and therefore give each process more priority. I can do this without any modification to my code (or use the system call) using the nice command.

2. Use sched_setscheduler() for the entire process to a particular scheduling policy.

3. Use pthread_setschedparam() to individually set each pthread.

I have run into the following roadblocks:

1. Say I go with choice 3, how do I prevent lower priority threads from being starved? Is there also a way to ensure that shared locks cause lower priority threads to be promoted to a higher priority? Say I have a thread that's real-time, SCHED_RR and it shared a lock with a default, SCHED_OTHER thread. When the SCHED_OTHER thread gets the lock, I want it to execute @ higher priority to free the lock. How do I ensure this?

2. If a thread of SCHED_RR creates another thread, is the new thread automatically SCHED_RR, or do I need to specify this? What if I have a process that I have set to SCHED_RR, do all its threads automatically follow this policy? What if a process of SCHED_RR spawns a child process, is it too automatically SCHED_RR?

3. Does any of this matter given that the code only uses up 60% of the CPU? Or are there still issues with the CPU being shared with background processes that I should be concerned with and could be caused my buffer overflows?

Sorry for the long winded question, but I felt it needed some background info. Thanks in advance for the help.

Answer 1

(1) pthread_mutex_setprioceiling

(2) A newly created thread inherits the schedule and priority of its creating thread unless it's thread attributes (e.g. pthread_attr_setschedparam / pthread_attr_setschedpolicy) are directed to do otherwise when you call pthread_create.

(3) Since you don't know what causes it now it is in fairness hard for anyone say with assurance.