Title :
A measurement-based analysis of the real-time performance of linux
Author :
Abeni, Luca ; Goel, Ashvin ; Krasic, Charles ; Snow, Jim ; Walpole, Jonathan
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci. & Eng., Oregon Graduate Inst., Portland, OR, USA
Abstract :
This paper presents an experimental study of the latency behavior of the Linux OS. We identify major sources of latency in the kernel with the goal of providing real-time performance in a widely used general-purpose operating system. We quantify, each source of latency with a series of micro-benchmarks and also evaluate the effects of latency on a time-sensitive application. Our analysis shows that there are two main causes of latency in the OS: tinier resolution and non-preemptable sections. Our experiments show that in the standard Linux kernel the tinier resolution latency is predominant, and generally hides the non-preemptable section latency We use accurate timers to reduce timer resolution latency and then analyze the non-preemptable section latency for several variants of Linux.
Keywords :
interrupts; operating systems (computers); software performance evaluation; Linux; general-purpose operating system; latency behavior; measurement-based analysis; microbenchmarks; nonpreemptable sections; real-time performance; time-sensitive application; tinier resolution; tinier resolution latency; Application software; Delay; Kernel; Linux; Operating systems; Performance analysis; Processor scheduling; Real time systems; Snow; Streaming media;
Conference_Titel :
Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium, 2002. Proceedings. Eighth IEEE
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-1739-0
DOI :
10.1109/RTTAS.2002.1137388