Jeff Roberson

Jeff Roberson 下周左右将会正式发表对于 UFS 的一项改进，为 Soft Updates 加入 Journal-ling，从而简化其恢复逻辑，并消除对 fsck 的依赖。

目前常见的保持元数据一致性的方法有四种：最原始的、将元数据以同步方式写盘的方法，性能非常差；常见的文件系统中使用的元数据回写日志（如ext3），缺点是无法检验日志本身的正确性，而且元数据需要写入两次因此对性能有潜在影响；Soft Updates，缺点是需要运行fsck来释放资源泄漏，而这个操作很耗时，且实现本身比较复杂；Copy-on-Write，在WAFL和ZFS中采用的技术，随着硬盘的淘汰随机存取时间不再是性能瓶颈，应该是未来的发展趋势，目前的缺点是会导致产生较多碎片。SU+J结合了Soft Updates和Journalling的优点，即，使用Soft Updates来确保写到磁盘上的数据的一致性，而使用Journalling来确保资源泄漏能够迅速回收，从而消除了fsck的必要性。

Today, Jeff Roberson has committed his version 2.0 ULE scheduler. This new version has addressed several design issues as well as several bugs.

The new scheduler has adopted a circular queue, instead of the double-queue structure which is also found in the Linux O(1) scheduler. The latter has lead to difficulty implementing nice correctly.

For uniprocessor case, ULE is now faster.

MP algorithm has been simplified a bit.

A lot of bugfixes, etc.

To quote the original commit message:

ULE 2.0:

• Remove the double queue mechanism for timeshare threads. It was slow due to excess cache lines in play, caused suboptimal scheduling behavior with niced and other non-interactive processes, complicated priority lending, etc.
• Use a circular queue with a floating starting index for timeshare threads. Enforces fairness by moving the insertion point closer to threads with worse priorities over time.
• Give interactive timeshare threads real-time user-space priorities and place them on the realtime/ithd queue.
• Select non-interactive timeshare thread priorities based on their cpu utilization over the last 10 seconds combined with the nice value. This gives us more sane priorities and behavior in a loaded system as compared to the old method of using the interactivity score. The interactive score quickly hit a ceiling if threads were non-interactive and penalized new hog threads.
• Use one slice size for all threads. The slice is not currently dynamically set to adjust scheduling behavior of different threads.
• Add some new sysctls for scheduling parameters.

Bug fixes/Clean up:

• Fix zeroing of td_sched after initialization in sched_fork_thread() caused by recent ksegrp removal.
• Fix KSE interactivity issues related to frequent forking and exiting of kse threads. We simply disable the penalty for thread creation and exit for kse threads.
• Cleanup the cpu estimator by using tickincr here as well. Keep ticks and ltick/ftick in the same frequency. Previously ticks were stathz and others were hz.
• Lots of new and updated comments.
• Many many others.

Tested on: up x86/amd64, 8way amd64.

As planned, Jeff Roberson has made ULE scheduler the default for FreeBSD’s CVS -HEAD. This is an important step going forward to 5-STABLE.