Special schedulers, one CPU only kernel, one only userland

From: Andre Oppermann (andre_at_freebsd.org)
Date: 08/10/05

  • Next message: Robert Watson: "Re: Special schedulers, one CPU only kernel, one only userland" 
    Date: Wed, 10 Aug 2005 14:02:58 +0200
To: arch@freebsd.org

    When using FreeBSD as a high performance router there are some desirable
    changes to the way multiple CPUs are handled. Normally a second CPU doesn't
    add much (if any) performance to routing because of locking overhead and
    packets randomly being processed by the CPUs wasting cache efficiency.
    On the other hand having just one CPU is not optimal in running the routing
    daemon in userland. When there are large changes to the table (eg. BGP
    full feed flap) userland sucks time away from the packet forwarding in
    the kernel.

    The idea is to combine both worlds by designating CPU0 exclusively for
    all kernel processing (thus avoiding the expensive mutex synchronization
    and bus locking instructions) and CPU1 exclusively for all userland
    processing. Whenever a userland program does a syscall the kernel CPU
    will take over. When it's done, the process get run by the userland
    CPU again. That way we get a very good scalability out of two CPUs for
    this particular task.

    Hence my question to the SMP and scheduler gurus: How well does the current
    SMP and scheduler architecture lend itself to this kind of special handling?
    Is it just a matter of modifying (or plugging in) the schedule or are there
    more involved things to consider? 

    -- 
Andre
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