TDMA / Interrupts / Pre-emptible

[Harti Brandt]

On Fri, 7 Dec 2007, Bruce M. Simpson wrote:

BMS>I can't comment on kernel scheduler jitter though, so someone who is working
BMS>directly in that area will hopefully respond -- arch@ or hackers@ might be a
BMS>better place to field that question.
BMS>
BMS>I believe microsecond resolution for your app should be possible in the
BMS>kernel. If it isn't, I'd like to know why. [It would be really, really nice
BMS>to have better real-time support in FreeBSD, i.e. a deadline scheduler.]

A couple of years I did exactly the same as the OP - implementing a 
satellite MAC layer (FM-TDMA) on a cluster of 5 FreeBSD machines. I think 
it was the time when we moved from 4.X to 5.0 or 5.1. I could not get it 
reliable because the jitter in the kernel (I implemented everything in 
netgraph over ethernet) was in the order of several 100 usec. I had HZ at 
10000 (all my simulation machines run on that). I tried really hard to 
find out where these jitters came from, but failed. Trying to trace the 
timing of execution changed the figures completely each time. Finally I 
gave up, because the project luckily ended :-/ At one point I tried to 
bump HZ to 20000 or so, but at this point TCP broke. I think this might 
have come from the RTT computation which is/was done in ticks and the 
square of something would overflow the variable.

One must also carefully choose the ethernet adapter for this kind of 
things, because it may add any kind of jitter/delay. At that time the best 
where the DEC/intel if_dc types.

Of course with the actual kernel the situation may be quite different. 
Don't know what influence have interrupt threads and this stuff. I would 
be interested to hear how things work out and, yeah, better real-time 
support would be great :-)

Regards,
harti