Preemption package

The preemption package provides a mechanism by which control can pass between light-weight processes without the need for explicit calls to LWP_DispatchProcess. This effect is achieved by periodically interrupting the normal flow of control to check if other (higher priority) procesess are ready to run.

The package makes use of the interval timer facilities provided by 4.2BSD, and so will cause programs that make their own use of these facilities to malfunction. In particular, use of alarm(3) or explicit handling of SIGALRM is disallowed. Also, calls to sleep(3) may return prematurely.

Care should be taken that routines are re-entrant where necessary. In particular, note that stdio(3) is not re-entrant in general, and hence light-weight processes performing I/O on the same FILE structure may function incorrectly.

Key Design Choices

The package should not affect the nonpreemptive scheduling behaviour of processes which do not use it.
It must be simple and fast, with a minimum of extra system overhead.
It must support nested critical regions.
Processes using the package are assumed to be co-operating.

A Simple Example

#include <sys/time.h>
#include "preempt.h"

    ...
    struct timeval tv;

    LWP_Init(LWP_VERSION, ...);
    tv.tv_sec = 10;
    tv.tv_usec = 0;
    PRE_InitPreempt(&tv);
    PRE_PreemptMe();
    ...
    PRE_BeginCritical();
    ...
    PRE_EndCritical();
    ...
    PRE_EndPreempt();
    ...

Preemption Primitives

PRE_InitPreempt

int PRE_InitPreempt(
    in struct timeval *slice
);

Initialize the preemption package. This routine must be called to initialize the package (after the call to LWP_Init).

Parameters

slice: The period of the implicit scheduler calls. Use NULL to obtain a useful default.

Completion Codes

LWP_SUCCESS: All went well.

LWP_EINIT: LWP_Init was not called.

LWP_ESYSTEM: A system call failed.

PRE_EndPreempt

int PRE_EndPreempt();

Finalize the preemption package. No further preemptions will be made. Note that is not necessary to make this call before exit - it is provided only for those applications that wish to continue after turning off preemptions.

Completion Codes

LWP_SUCCESS: All went well.

LWP_EINIT: LWP_Init was not called.

LWP_ESYSTEM: A system call failed.

PRE_PreemptMe

PRE_PreemptMe();

This is a macro that marks the current process as a candidate for preemption. It is erroneous to invoke PRE_PreemptMe if LWP_Init has not been called.

PRE_BeginCritical

PRE_BeginCritical();

This routine places the current LWP in a Critical Section. Upon return, involunatry preemptions of this process will no longer occur. Note that this is a macro and that LWP_Init must have been previously invoked.

PRE_EndCritical

PRE_EndCritical();

This routine leaves a critical section previously entered with PRE_BeginCritical. If involuntary preemptions were possible before the matching PRE_BeginCritical, they are once again possible. Note that this is a macro and that LWP_Init must have been previously invoked.