Re: Call for Foundation-supported Project Ideas

On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 12:53:20PM +0100, Stefan Esser wrote:
> Am 23.11.21 um 23:41 schrieb Joseph Mingrone:
> > Hello FreeBSD community,
> > 
> > The Foundation is seeking suggestions for new projects to support.  What
> > gaps in the Project are not being addressed by the broader community?
> 
> The "new" ULE scheduler has a number of well-known issues, which leads
> to the "old" BSD scheduler giving better performance on many systems
> and loads, but is based on concepts that made sense in pre-SMP times.
> 
> ULE suffers from pathological behavior in many scenarios, and it does
> not know how to best deal with simultaneous multi-threading, big/little
> architectures, or the effects of virtualization.
> 
> ULE does not care for the "niceness" of a process and lets nice -19
> processes run with hardly any reduction of the share of CPU cycles
> granted compared to competing nice 0 processes, for example.
> 
> Virtualization gives a number of additional requirements and restrictions
> in both the host and client. Schedulers in other operating systems have
> been modified to reduce the risk of side-channel attacks by running only
> processes for one user at a time on the virtual processors of an SMT core.
> 
> Within a virtual machine, the real topology of the underlying hardware
> may be hidden and scheduling effects by the VM host may need to be taken
> into consideration (e.g. clock variations and "time jumps"). There is
> a connection to bhyve, at least (perhaps also to other virtualization
> platforms) that has to be taken into account.
> 
> Another aspect is optimization for performance vs. optimization for
> low power use, which both require a specific scheduling strategy on
> complex CPU topologies.
> 
> IMHO, a scheduler design that is based on experiences gained by other
> projects and our knowledge of deficiencies of the currently available
> schedulers in FreeBSD under specific loads could be a huge win for the
> project.
> 
> This would be a long-term project, and I do not see any developer
> currently working on designing or implementing a new scheduler.
> 
> There have been minor changes to SCHED_ULE, recently, but I'd think
> that a completely new design will be required, based on knowledge
> gained in the last 1 or 2 decades and able to deal with architectural
> changes that have occurred in that time frame.

I also wonder how the recent push to big.little on multiple
CPU architectures affects FreeBSD and how we could support it.

Thanks,

-- 
Shawn Webb
Cofounder / Security Engineer
HardenedBSD

https://git.hardenedbsd.org/hardenedbsd/pubkeys/-/raw/master/Shawn_Webb/03A4CBEBB82EA5A67D9F3853FF2E67A277F8E1FA.pub.asc