Wine scheduling and threading issues [was Re: Threading issues...]

[Con Kolivas]

Jeremy White wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> This is simply a renaming and reorganizing post; Dimi wacked me
> with a clue bat, and I am now looping Ingo Molnar into this
> conversation (and I am doing it at great haste since he
> made noises about helping <grin>).
> 
> The thread started here:
>   http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-devel/2004/08/0306.html
>   http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-devel/2004/09/0081.html
> 
> picked up a bit here:
>   http://www.winehq.org/hypermail/wine-devel/2005/01/0331.html
> 
> (the multiple URLs are entirely due to the apparent failing
> of hypermail to span month boundaries).
> 
> I've asserted that a large obstacle we face is our inability
> to replicate the Windows concept of thread priorities.
> 
> Ove recently added what struck me as a very interesting suggestion:
> 
>>
>> The biggest problem is that there is no way to say to the kernel that
>> one thread is more important than another without permanently renicing
>> all other threads. A potential kernel solution to the problem would be
>> to implement process scoping in the kernel, i.e.
>>
>> pthread_attr_setscope(attr, PTHREAD_SCOPE_PROCESS)
>>
>> and then allow threads scoped this way to be set to high priority, since
>> with a process scope, these threads should only preempt other threads in
>> the same process (i.e. Wine), not threads run by other Linux apps, and
>> thus the security concerns of elevated priority threads are irrelevant.
>>
>> Allowing a process-scoped thread to set the scheduling policy to
>> SCHED_RR in order to inhibit the kernel's interactivity priority boost
>> system would also help.
>>
>>
> 
> And that brings us up to date.

I posted a patch for SCHED_BOUND to do just such a thing to the linux 
kernel mailing list 2 months ago. Noone responded so I didn't pursue it.

Con
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