Clustered/partitioned scheduling helps to control the worst-case
latencies in the system. The goal is to reduce the amount of shared
state in the system and thus prevention of lock contention. Modern
multi-processor systems tend to have several layers of data and
instruction caches. With clustered/partitioned scheduling it is
possible to honour the cache topology of a system and thus avoid
expensive cache synchronization traffic.
We have clustered scheduling in case the set of processors of a system
is partitioned into non-empty pairwise-disjoint subsets. These subsets
are called clusters. Clusters with a cardinality of one are partitions.
Each cluster is owned by exactly one scheduler instance.
The thread control block contains fields that point to application
configuration dependent memory areas, like the scheduler information,
the API control blocks, the user extension context table, the RTEMS
notepads and the Newlib re-entrancy support. Account for these areas in
the configuration and avoid extra workspace allocations for these areas.
This helps also to avoid heap fragementation and reduces the per thread
memory due to a reduced heap allocation overhead.
Do not allocate the scheduler control structures from the workspace.
This is a preparation step for configuration of clustered/partitioned
schedulers on SMP.
Add and use _CPU_SMP_Start_processor(). Add and use
_CPU_SMP_Finalize_initialization(). This makes most
_CPU_SMP_Initialize() functions a bit simpler since we can calculate the
minimum value of the count of processors requested by the application
configuration and the count of physically or virtually available
processors in the high-level code.
The CPU port has now the ability to signal a processor start failure.
With the support for clustered/partitioned scheduling the presence of
particular processors can be configured to be optional or mandatory.
There will be a fatal error only in case mandatory processors are not
present.
The CPU port may use a timeout to monitor the start of a processor.
Rename rtems_smp_get_current_processor() in
rtems_get_current_processor(). Make rtems_get_current_processor() a
function in uni-processor configurations to enable ABI compatibility
with SMP configurations.
Rename rtems_smp_get_processor_count() in rtems_get_processor_count().
Make rtems_get_processor_count() a function in uni-processor
configurations to enable ABI compatibility with SMP configurations.
This simplifies the RTEMS initialization and helps to avoid a memory
overhead. The workspace demands of the IO manager were not included in
the <rtems/confdefs.h> workspace size estimate. This is also fixed as a
side-effect.
Update documentation and move "Specifying Application Defined Device
Driver Table" to the section end. This sub-section is not that
important for the user. Mentioning this at the beginning may lead to
confusion.
Per task variables are inherently unsafe in SMP systems. This
patch disables them from the build and adds warnings in the
appropriate documentation and configuration sections.
