A realtime developer's checklist

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Realtime application development under Linux requires care to make sure that the critical realtime tasks do not suffer interference from other applications and the rest of the system. During the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) 2020, John Ogness presented a checklist (slides [PDF]) for realtime developers, with practical recipes to follow. There are a lot of tools and features available for realtime developers, even on systems without the RT_PREEMPT patches applied.

What is realtime?

We want all applications to be correct and bug-free, Ogness began; in the realtime domain, correctness "means running at the correct time". The application must wake up within a bounded time limit when there is time-critical work to do. Ogness highlighted that, in realtime systems, the right timing of tasks is a requirement; things will go wrong if the constraints are not met. Developers need to define which tasks and applications are time-critical; he noted that a lot of people mistakenly think that all tasks in a realtime system are realtime, while most of them are not.

The good news for developers is that, under Linux, they can write realtime applications using only the POSIX API with the realtime extensions. The code will look familiar, and only three additional header files are required: sched.h (a member of the audience noted that the musl C library does not implement this one), time.h, and pthread.h.

There are three properties that a realtime operating system must have: deterministic scheduling behavior, interruptibility (the CPU is always running something, so there should be a way to interrupt a task), and a way to avoid priority inversion, which happens when a high-priority task must wait for a lower-priority one. The third property, which might be less familiar to non-realtime developers, was described with an example.

Consider three tasks (task1, task2, and task3 with high, medium, and low priority, respectively). Task3 is holding a lock when task1 comes along, takes the CPU and requests that lock. As task1 is high priority, the scheduler puts task3 back on the CPU so that it can finish its work and release the lock. Before that happens, though, task2 comes along. It has nothing to do with the lock, but it has a higher priority than task3. The scheduler then makes a good decision to give the CPU to task2, but this is indirectly blocking task1.

In this case we have a priority inversion between task1 and task2. A situation like that can come about easily in a complex system like Linux, Ogness noted. The way Linux handles priority inversion is to temporarily boost the priority of task3 to the priority level of task1. When task3 gives back the lock, it will be de-boosted and task1 can run with the lock.

Scheduling and affinity

Ogness started his realtime checklist with scheduling policies, which vary between the realtime and non-realtime domains. Non-realtime policies implement fixed time slices; if an application is running an infinite loop, it will still lose the CPU when its time slice runs out. On a realtime system, most tasks, including logging daemons, web servers, and databases, will still use non-realtime policies. "These processes should not be running as realtime", he said. In addition, the developer can configure those non-realtime tasks to limit how much CPU they can have using nice and control groups; for example, the web browser can be constrained to never take more than 20% of the available CPU time. He "strongly encourages" developers to evaluate all tasks, not only the realtime ones, for their resource requirements.

Realtime tasks, instead, normally run until they give up the CPU or are preempted by a higher-priority task. If there is a task with priority 30, it will run until a task with a higher priority comes in (like priority 31). For realtime tasks, one needs to be especially careful when writing the code, and to avoid infinite loops, which can render the system unusable.

The SCHED_FIFO realtime scheduling policy is what people typically use, Ogness said. Tasks running under this policy execute until they are blocked (waiting) or freely give up the CPU. Priorities range from one to 99 (highest). "Please never use 99", Ogness said, as kernel threads using this priority are "more important than your application". Another policy, SCHED_RR is similar, but it uses time slices for tasks at the same priority level. The third scheduling policy is SCHED_DEADLINE, where the scheduler runs the task with the closest deadline. Ogness did not cover this policy, but noted that if it is used, SCHED_DEADLINE wins over highest priority tasks from other scheduling policies; mixing scheduling classes is "strange".

Ogness pointed out one important kernel feature with regard to realtime scheduling policies: by default, the scheduler limits the amount of CPU time allocated to all realtime tasks together to 95% of the available time per second. In the remaining 50ms of each second, no realtime task is allowed to run. This policy gives an administrator a chance to intervene if a realtime task goes out of control. This situation should be avoided, though, since it constitutes a sort of priority inversion. He noted that, if the kernel hits the limit, it prints a throttling message in the kernel log, but the realtime system is already broken at this point. This feature can be disabled by writing -1 into /proc/sys/kernel/sched_rt_runtime_us. The change is not permanent, so it needs to be added to boot scripts.

Developers can set priorities and scheduling policies using the chrt tool; the -p option sets the priority of a given task. The tool can also be used to start an application with a given priority. The same operations are possible in the code by using the sched_setscheduler() system call.

CPU affinity is another important element in a realtime system. It might be critical to isolate code onto some CPUs. Ogness gave an example of an eight-CPU system divided into six CPUs for non-realtime applications and two for realtime. In Linux, CPU affinity is defined for each task and takes the form of a bitmask with one bit set for each allowed CPU. In addition to user-space tasks, interrupts and kernel threads can also have their affinity set. This is important, as they may interfere with realtime code. Ogness noted that the internal architecture of a processor will influence the realtime configuration. If two CPUs are sharing L2 caches, then they should be both realtime, as cache sharing between realtime and non-realtime applications may have an effect on realtime latency.

The tool to set and query affinities is taskset, which can either start a task or modify an existing one. taskset also applies to threads. If run without a new mask, it will show what the current mask is. As with priorities, an associated system call exists: sched_setaffinity(). Ogness noted that it requires that _GNU_SOURCE be defined, since the sched_setaffinity() wrapper is a GNU C library (glibc) extension and not part of the POSIX API.

It is also possible to influence CPU affinity in a deeper way using the maxcpus and isolcpus boot parameters. maxcpus limits the number of CPUs the kernel can see. If set to four in an eight-CPU system, it means that the kernel will see only four processors and the other four CPUs can be used differently, such as by a bare-metal realtime application. On the other hand, isolcpus indicates to the kernel that it should not put kernel threads on the indicated processors. When using isolcpus, Linux is aware of all of the CPUs and can use the isolated CPUs when threads are explicitly set to run on them.

For interrupt affinities, the default settings for new interrupts can be viewed and changed in /proc/irq/default_smp_affinity. For an existing interrupt, intr, the file /proc/irq/intr/smp_affinity allows doing the same. Developers should be aware, Ogness said, that there might be hardware limitations when setting affinities; after setting an interrupt affinity they should consult /proc/irq/intr/effective_affinity to check what was set after taking all limitations into account.

Avoiding page faults

Memory management is "probably most important" in terms of latency. He explained that, when an application allocates memory, it is not really allocated in the kernel, but only marked in the page tables. The actual allocation takes place when that memory is first accessed and results in a page fault. Page faults are "quite expensive" as the kernel needs to find a physical page and assign it before the application can continue. Developers can verify this by observing that malloc() calls are fast, but the application slows down when it starts using the allocated memory for the first time. This applies to not only the heap, but to all memory, including code and the stack. Moving to the next stack page will cause a page fault just like the allocation of new memory.

Ogness described three steps to avoid page faults. The first is to tune glibc to use the heap only for new allocations. malloc() has two ways to allocate memory: the heap or mmap() for separate chunks. Realtime developers do not want separate chunks, as they may go back to the kernel after free(); then if they are reallocated they will fault again. The developers can direct glibc to use heap memory only by using mallopt():

    mallopt(M_MMAP_MAX, 0);

Another useful option is to disable the possibility that glibc gives unused memory back to the kernel:

    mallopt(M_TRIM_THRESHOLD,-1);

The second step is to lock down allocated pages so that they "never get back to the kernel". This can happen when the kernel reclaims memory or starts swapping. Embedded developers may think their system will not swap, but this is not true, Ogness explained. When low on memory, the kernel starts reclaiming any memory it can, including the text segments of applications. For realtime "this is horrible", because when the application runs again it will need to get the pages back from the disk. To lock all pages into memory, a realtime application should use mlockall():

    mlockall(MCL_CURRENT | MCL_FUTURE);

The third and final step is to perform pre-faulting, which means causing all page faults ahead of time and having all memory "ready to go". Heap pre-faulting is done by allocating all of the memory that might be needed, then writing a non-zero value to each page to make sure that the writes are not optimized away. Stack pre-faulting should be done in a similar way by creating and writing a big stack frame, something that developers have "learned never to do" in general.

Synchronization without priority inversion

In realtime systems, developers should use POSIX mutexes for locking, Ogness said. This is important because mutexes have owners, and only the owner can release the lock. This gives the kernel the information needed to boost a lock-holding task when a higher-priority task needs that lock. By default, however, priority inheritance is not activated (even with PREEMPT_RT, he pointed out), so the developers need to activate it to avoid priority inversion using:

    pthread_mutexattr_setprotocol(&mattr, PTHREAD_PRIO_INHERIT);

For signaling between threads, Ogness recommended conditional variables as they can be associated with mutexes. If an application needs to wait and then take a lock, then pthread_cond_wait() is the tool for the job. Realtime developers should avoid signals because the environment that the signal handler runs in is hard to predict.

Clocks and measurements

"Use the monotonic clock", Ogness recommended. This is the clock that always moves forward, without regard to time zones and leap seconds. The absolute time it gives is ideal to calculate the time the task should sleep. The technique he presented consists of getting the current time once, at the beginning of the program, and then just incrementing the clock thereafter. This way the task will wake up in the right moment "even in 10 years", he said.

The last part of the talk covered tools that can be used to evaluate the realtime system. The first two tools come from the rt-tests package. cyclictest measures latencies at the given priority level. It repeatedly sleeps, then checks the clock to measure the difference between the expected and real wake-up times. This tool can prepare histograms with the resulting data. Developers will want to run it with a high load on the system to measure the latencies that the system may generate. The other tool, hackbench, can generate system load with packets, CPU load, and even out-of-memory events. A realtime system should run well even in those conditions. Ogness noted the developers should be doing stress tests for all components. For example, if the system uses Bluetooth, then it requires a Bluetooth test. He also reminded developers to include idle-mode testing, as the system latency might be different when going to low-power modes.

perf can also help developers, as it can show the number of page faults and cache misses. Ogness mentioned the kernel tracing infrastructure that can help to show not only what happens during an application's execution, but also when. A member of the audience asked if there is a way to calculate the worst response time of a task, and Ogness replied that the only solution is to test.

Ogness finished with a list of kernel configuration options to check. For example, CONFIG_PREEMPT_* activates more kernel realtime properties (more still if the PREEMPT_RT patches have been applied). CONFIG_LOCKUP_DETECTOR and CONFIG_DETECT_HUNG_TASK run at realtime priority 99, so they should be disabled if not explicitly needed. CONFIG_NO_HZ eliminates kernel clock ticks and can reduce power consumption, but it can also increase latency. He said that setting any particular option is not necessarily an error, but they need to be analyzed and checked; there might be decisions to make for example between power saving and realtime.

At the end of the talk, he walked through the checklist again, highlighting the need to verify the realtime behavior. For the members of the audience who would like to learn more there is a realtime wiki. "Have fun with realtime Linux", he concluded.