The new scheduler serves the orthogonal requirements of both
high-throughput-oriented scheduling contexts (shortly called fill in the
scheduler) and low-latency-oriented scheduling contexts (shortly called
claim in the scheduler). Thus it knows two scheduling modes. Every claim
owns a CPU-time-quota expressed as percentage of a super period
(currently 1 second) and a priority that is absolute as long as the
claim has quota left for the current super period. At the end of a super
period the quota of all claims gets refreshed. During a super period,
the claim mode is dominant as long as any active claim has quota left.
Every time this isn't the case, the scheduler switches to scheduling of
fills. Fills are scheduled in a simple round robin with identical time
slices. Order and time-slices of the fill scheduling are not affected by
the super period. Now on thread creation, two arguments, priority and
quota are needed. If quota is 0, the new thread participates in CPU
scheduling with a fill only. Otherwise he participates with both a
claim and a fill. This concept dovetails nicely with Genodes quota based
resource management as any process can grant subsets of its own
CPU-time and priorities to its child without knowing the global means of
CPU-time and priority.
The commit also adds a run script that enables an automated unit test of the
scheduler implementation.
fix#1225
Kernel tests are done by replacing the implementation of an otherwise
empty function 'Kernel::test' that gets called once at the primary CPU
as soon as all kernel initialization is done. To achieve this, the test
binary that implements 'Kernel::test' must be linked against the core
lib and must then replace the core binary when composing the boot image.
The latter can be done conveniently in a run script by setting the new
argument 'core_type' of the function 'build_boot_image' to the falue
'test'. If no kernel test is needed the argument does not have to be
given - it is set to 'core' by default which results in a "normal"
Genode image.
ref #1225
Previously, we did the protection-domain switches without a transitional
translation table that contains only global mappings. This was fine as long
as the CPU did no speculative memory accesses. However, to enabling branch
prediction triggers such accesses. Thus, if we don't want to invalidate
predictors on every context switch, we need to switch more carefully.
ref #474
By now the scheduling timer was only refreshed for a new scheduling timeout
when the choosen scheduling context has changed. But we want it to be refreshed
also when the scheduled context yields without an effect to the schedulers
choice (this is the case e.g. when the idle thread gets a scheduling timeout
or a thread yields without any competitor in its priority band).
ref #1151
This patch changes the top-level directory layout as a preparatory
step for improving the tools for managing 3rd-party source codes.
The rationale is described in the issue referenced below.
Issue #1082
