In Linux, what happens to the state of a process when it needs to read blocks from a disk? Is it blocked? If so, how is another process chosen to execute?
When a process needs to fetch data from a disk, it effectively stops running on the CPU to let other processes run because the operation might take a long time to complete – at least 5ms seek time for a disk is common, and 5ms is 10 million CPU cycles, an eternity from the point of view of the program!
From the programmer point of view (also said "in userspace"), this is called a blocking system call. If you call write(2) (which is a thin libc wrapper around the system call of the same name), your process does not exactly stop at that boundary; it continues, in the kernel, running the system call code. Most of the time it goes all the way up to a specific disk controller driver (filename → filesystem/VFS → block device → device driver), where a command to fetch a block on disk is submitted to the proper hardware, which is a very fast operation most of the time.
THEN the process is put in sleep state (in kernel space, blocking is called sleeping – nothing is ever 'blocked' from the kernel point of view). It will be awakened once the hardware has finally fetched the proper data, then the process will be marked as runnable and will be scheduled. Eventually, the scheduler will run the process.
Finally, in userspace, the blocking system call returns with proper status and data, and the program flow goes on.
It is possible to invoke most I/O system calls in non-blocking mode (see O_NONBLOCK in open(2) and fcntl(2)). In this case, the system calls return immediately and only report submitting the disk operation. The programmer will have to explicitly check at a later time whether the operation completed, successfully or not, and fetch its result (e.g., with select(2)). This is called asynchronous or event-based programming.
Most answers here mentioning the D state (which is called TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE in the Linux state names) are incorrect. The D state is a special sleep mode which is only triggered in a kernel space code path, when that code path can't be interrupted (because it would be too complex to program), with the expectation that it would block only for a very short time. I believe that most "D states" are actually invisible; they are very short lived and can't be observed by sampling tools such as 'top'.
You can encounter unkillable processes in the D state in a few situations. NFS is famous for that, and I've encountered it many times. I think there's a semantic clash between some VFS code paths, which assume to always reach local disks and fast error detection (on SATA, an error timeout would be around a few 100 ms), and NFS, which actually fetches data from the network which is more resilient and has slow recovery (a TCP timeout of 300 seconds is common). Read this article for the cool solution introduced in Linux 2.6.25 with the TASK_KILLABLE state. Before this era there was a hack where you could actually send signals to NFS process clients by sending a SIGKILL to the kernel thread rpciod, but forget about that ugly trick.…
While waiting for read() or write() to/from a file descriptor return, the process will be put in a special kind of sleep, known as "D" or "Disk Sleep". This is special, because the process can not be killed or interrupted while in such a state. A process waiting for a return from ioctl() would also be put to sleep in this manner.
An exception to this is when a file (such as a terminal or other character device) is opened in O_NONBLOCK mode, passed when its assumed that a device (such as a modem) will need time to initialize. However, you indicated block devices in your question. Also, I have never tried an ioctl() that is likely to block on a fd opened in non blocking mode (at least not knowingly).
How another process is chosen depends entirely on the scheduler you are using, as well as what other processes might have done to modify their weights within that scheduler.
Some user space programs under certain circumstances have been known to remain in this state forever, until rebooted. These are typically grouped in with other "zombies", but the term would not be correct as they are not technically defunct.
A process performing I/O will be put in D state (uninterruptable sleep), which frees the CPU until there is a hardware interrupt which tells the CPU to return to executing the program. See man ps for the other process states.
Depending on your kernel, there is a process scheduler, which keeps track of a runqueue of processes ready to execute. It, along with a scheduling algorithm, tells the kernel which process to assign to which CPU. There are kernel processes and user processes to consider. Each process is allocated a time-slice, which is a chunk of CPU time it is allowed to use. Once the process uses all of its time-slice, it is marked as expired and given lower priority in the scheduling algorithm.
In the 2.6 kernel, there is a O(1) time complexity scheduler, so no matter how many processes you have up running, it will assign CPUs in constant time. It is more complicated though, since 2.6 introduced preemption and CPU load balancing is not an easy algorithm. In any case, it’s efficient and CPUs will not remain idle while you wait for the I/O.
As already explained by others, processes in "D" state (uninterruptible sleep) are responsible for the hang of ps process. To me it has happened many times with RedHat 6.x and automounted NFS home directories.
To list processes in D state you can use the following commands:
cd /proc
for i in [0-9]*;do echo -n "$i :";cat $i/status |grep ^State;done|grep D
To know the current directory of the process and, may be, the mounted NFS disk that has issues you can use a command similar to the following example (replace 31134 with the sleeping process number):
# ls -l /proc/31134/cwd
lrwxrwxrwx 1 pippo users 0 Aug 2 16:25 /proc/31134/cwd -> /auto/pippo
I found that giving the umount command with the -f (force) switch, to the related mounted nfs file system, was able to wake-up the sleeping process:
umount -f /auto/pippo
the file system wasn't unmounted, because it was busy, but the related process did wake-up and I was able to solve the issue without rebooting.
Assuming your process is a single thread, and that you're using blocking I/O, your process will block waiting for the I/O to complete. The kernel will pick another process to run in the meantime based on niceness, priority, last run time, etc. If there are no other runnable processes, the kernel won't run any; instead, it'll tell the hardware the machine is idle (which will result in lower power consumption).
Processes that are waiting for I/O to complete typically show up in state D in, e.g., ps and top.
Yes, the task gets blocked in the read() system call. Another task which is ready runs, or if no other tasks are ready, the idle task (for that CPU) runs.
A normal, blocking disc read causes the task to enter the "D" state (as others have noted). Such tasks contribute to the load average, even though they're not consuming the CPU.
Some other types of IO, especially ttys and network, do not behave quite the same - the process ends up in "S" state and can be interrupted and doesn't count against the load average.
Yes, tasks waiting for IO are blocked, and other tasks get executed. Selecting the next task is done by the Linux scheduler.
Generally the process will block. If the read operation is on a file descriptor marked as non-blocking or if the process is using asynchronous IO it won't block. Also if the process has other threads that aren't blocked they can continue running.
The decision as to which process runs next is up to the scheduler in the kernel.
Related
Sometimes whenever I write a program in Linux and it crashes due to a bug of some sort, it will become an uninterruptible process and continue running forever until I restart my computer (even if I log out). My questions are:
What causes a process to become uninterruptible?
How do I stop that from happening?
This is probably a dumb question, but is there any way to interrupt it without restarting my computer?
An uninterruptible process is a process which happens to be in a system call (kernel function) that cannot be interrupted by a signal.
To understand what that means, you need to understand the concept of an interruptible system call. The classic example is read(). This is a system call that can take a long time (seconds) since it can potentially involve spinning up a hard drive, or moving heads. During most of this time, the process will be sleeping, blocking on the hardware.
While the process is sleeping in the system call, it can receive a Unix asynchronous signal (say, SIGTERM), then the following happens:
The system call exits prematurely, and is set up to return -EINTR to user space.
The signal handler is executed.
If the process is still running, it gets the return value from the system call, and it can make the same call again.
Returning early from the system call enables the user space code to immediately alter its behavior in response to the signal. For example, terminating cleanly in reaction to SIGINT or SIGTERM.
On the other hand, some system calls are not allowed to be interrupted in this way. If the system calls stalls for some reason, the process can indefinitely remains in this unkillable state.
LWN ran a nice article that touched this topic in July.
To answer the original question:
How to prevent this from happening: figure out which driver is causing you trouble, and either stop using, or become a kernel hacker and fix it.
How to kill an uninterruptible process without rebooting: somehow make the system call terminate. Frequently the most effective manner to do this without hitting the power switch is to pull the power cord. You can also become a kernel hacker and make the driver use TASK_KILLABLE, as explained in the LWN article.
When a process is on user mode, it can be interrupted at any time (switching to kernel mode). When the kernel returns to user mode, it checks if there are any signals pending (including the ones which are used to kill the process, such as SIGTERM and SIGKILL). This means a process can be killed only on return to user mode.
The reason a process cannot be killed in kernel mode is that it could potentially corrupt the kernel structures used by all the other processes in the same machine (the same way killing a thread can potentially corrupt data structures used by other threads in the same process).
When the kernel needs to do something which could take a long time (waiting on a pipe written by another process or waiting for the hardware to do something, for instance), it sleeps by marking itself as sleeping and calling the scheduler to switch to another process (if there is no non-sleeping process, it switches to a "dummy" process which tells the cpu to slow down a bit and sits in a loop — the idle loop).
If a signal is sent to a sleeping process, it has to be woken up before it will return to user space and thus process the pending signal. Here we have the difference between the two main types of sleep:
TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE, the interruptible sleep. If a task is marked with this flag, it is sleeping, but can be woken by signals. This means the code which marked the task as sleeping is expecting a possible signal, and after it wakes up will check for it and return from the system call. After the signal is handled, the system call can potentially be automatically restarted (and I won't go into details on how that works).
TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE, the uninterruptible sleep. If a task is marked with this flag, it is not expecting to be woken up by anything other than whatever it is waiting for, either because it cannot easily be restarted, or because programs are expecting the system call to be atomic. This can also be used for sleeps known to be very short.
TASK_KILLABLE (mentioned in the LWN article linked to by ddaa's answer) is a new variant.
This answers your first question. As to your second question: you can't avoid uninterruptible sleeps, they are a normal thing (it happens, for instance, every time a process reads/writes from/to the disk); however, they should last only a fraction of a second. If they last much longer, it usually means a hardware problem (or a device driver problem, which looks the same to the kernel), where the device driver is waiting for the hardware to do something which will never happen. It can also mean you are using NFS and the NFS server is down (it is waiting for the server to recover; you can also use the "intr" option to avoid the problem).
Finally, the reason you cannot recover is the same reason the kernel waits until return to user mode to deliver a signal or kill the process: it would potentially corrupt the kernel's data structures (code waiting on an interruptible sleep can receive an error which tells it to return to user space, where the process can be killed; code waiting on an uninterruptible sleep is not expecting any error).
Uninterruptable processes are USUALLY waiting for I/O following a page fault.
Consider this:
The thread tries to access a page which is not in core (either an executable which is demand-loaded, a page of anonymous memory which has been swapped out, or a mmap()'d file which is demand loaded, which are much the same thing)
The kernel is now (trying to) load it in
The process can't continue until the page is available.
The process/task cannot be interrupted in this state, because it can't handle any signals; if it did, another page fault would happen and it would be back where it was.
When I say "process", I really mean "task", which under Linux (2.6) roughly translates to "thread" which may or may not have an individual "thread group" entry in /proc
In some cases, it may be waiting for a long time. A typical example of this would be where the executable or mmap'd file is on a network filesystem where the server has failed. If the I/O eventually succeeds, the task will continue. If it eventually fails, the task will generally get a SIGBUS or something.
To your 3rd question:
I think you can kill the uninterruptable processes by running
sudo kill -HUP 1.
It will restart init without ending the running processes and after running it, my uninterruptable processes were gone.
If you are talking about a "zombie" process (which is designated as "zombie" in ps output), then this is a harmless record in the process list waiting for someone to collect its return code and it could be safely ignored.
Could you please describe what and "uninterruptable process" is for you? Does it survives the "kill -9 " and happily chugs along? If that is the case, then it's stuck on some syscall, which is stuck in some driver, and you are stuck with this process till reboot (and sometimes it's better to reboot soon) or unloading of relevant driver (which is unlikely to happen). You could try to use "strace" to find out where your process is stuck and avoid it in the future.
I read that Linux kernel is preemptive, which is different from most Unix kernels. So, what does it really mean for a kernal to be preemptive?
Some analogies or examples would be better than pure theoretical explanation.
ADD 1 -- 11:00 AM 12/7/2018
Preemptive is just one paradigm of multi-tasking. There are others like Cooperative Multi-tasking. A better understanding can be achieved by comparing them.
Prior to Linux kernel version 2.5.4, Linux Kernel was not preemptive which means a process running in kernel mode cannot be moved out of processor until it itself leaves the processor or it starts waiting for some input output operation to get complete.
Generally a process in user mode can enter into kernel mode using system calls. Previously when the kernel was non-preemptive, a lower priority process could priority invert a higher priority process by denying it access to the processor by repeatedly calling system calls and remaining in the kernel mode. Even if the lower priority process' timeslice expired, it would continue running until it completed its work in the kernel or voluntarily relinquished control. If the higher priority process waiting to run is a text editor in which the user is typing or an MP3 player ready to refill its audio buffer, the result is poor interactive performance. This way non-preemptive kernel was a major drawback at that time.
Imagine the simple view of preemptive multi-tasking. We have two user tasks, both of which are running all the time without using any I/O or performing kernel calls. Those two tasks don't have to do anything special to be able to run on a multi-tasking operating system. The kernel, typically based on a timer interrupt, simply decides that it's time for one task to pause to let another one run. The task in question is completely unaware that anything happened.
However, most tasks make occasional requests of the kernel via syscalls. When this happens, the same user context exists, but the CPU is running kernel code on behalf of that task.
Older Linux kernels would never allow preemption of a task while it was busy running kernel code. (Note that I/O operations always voluntarily re-schedule. I'm talking about a case where the kernel code has some CPU-intensive operation like sorting a list.)
If the system allows that task to be preempted while it is running kernel code, then we have what is called a "preemptive kernel." Such a system is immune to unpredictable delays that can be encountered during syscalls, so it might be better suited for embedded or real-time tasks.
For example, if on a particular CPU there are two tasks available, and one takes a syscall that takes 5ms to complete, and the other is an MP3 player application that needs to feed the audio pipe every 2ms, you might hear stuttering audio.
The argument against preemption is that all kernel code that might be called in task context must be able to survive preemption-- there's a lot of poor device driver code, for example, that might be better off if it's always able to complete an operation before allowing some other task to run on that processor. (With multi-processor systems the rule rather than the exception these days, all kernel code must be re-entrant, so that argument isn't as relevant today.) Additionally, if the same goal could be met by improving the syscalls with bad latency, perhaps preemption is unnecessary.
A compromise is CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY, which allows a task-switch at certain points inside the kernel, but not everywhere. If there are only a small number of places where kernel code might get bogged down, this is a cheap way of reducing latency while keeping the complexity manageable.
Traditional unix kernels had a single lock, which was held by a thread while kernel code was running. Therefore no other kernel code could interrupt that thread.
This made designing the kernel easier, since you knew that while one thread using kernel resources, no other thread was. Therefore the different threads cannot mess up each others work.
In single processor systems this doesn't cause too many problems.
However in multiprocessor systems, you could have a situation where several threads on different processors or cores all wanted to run kernel code at the same time. This means that depending on the type of workload, you could have lots of processors, but all of them spend most of their time waiting for each other.
In Linux 2.6, the kernel resources were divided up into much smaller units, protected by individual locks, and the kernel code was reviewed to make sure that locks were only held while the corresponding resources were in use. So now different processors only have to wait for each other if they want access to the same resource (for example hardware resource).
The preemption allows the kernel to give the IMPRESSION of parallelism: you've got only one processor (let's say a decade ago), but you feel like all your processes are running simulaneously. That's because the kernel preempts (ie, take the execution out of) the execution from one process to give it to the next one (maybe according to their priority).
EDIT Not preemptive kernels wait for processes to give back the hand (ie, during syscalls), so if your process computes a lot of data and doesn't call any kind of yield function, the other processes won't be able to execute to execute their calls. Such systems are said to be cooperative because they ask for the cooperation of the processes to ensure the equity of the execution time
EDIT 2 The main goal of preemption is to improve the reactivity of the system among multiple tasks, so that's good for end-users, whereas on the other-hand, servers want to achieve the highest througput, so they don't need it: (from the Linux kernel configuration)
Preemptible kernel (low-latency desktop)
Voluntary kernel preemption (desktop)
No forced preemption (server)
The linux kernel is monolithic and give a little computing timespan to all the running process sequentially. It means that the processes (eg. the programs) do not run concurrently, but they are given a give timespan regularly to execute their logic. The main problem is that some logic can take longer to terminate and prevent the kernel to allow time for the next process. This results in system "lags".
A preemtive kernel has the ability to switch context. It means that it can stop a "hanging" process even if it is not finished, and give the computing time to the next process as expected. The "hanging" process will continue to execute when its time has come without any problem.
Practically, it means that the kernel has the ability to achieve tasks in realtime, which is particularly interesting for audio recording and editing.
The ubuntu studio districution packages a preemptive kernel as well as a buch of quality free software devoted to audio and video edition.
It means that the operating system scheduler is free to suspend the execution of the running processes to give the CPU to another process whenever it wants; the normal way to do this is to give to each process that is waiting for the CPU a "quantum" of CPU time to run. After it has expired the scheduler takes back the control (and the running process cannot avoid this) to give another quantum to another process.
This method is often compared with the cooperative multitasking, in which processes keep the CPU for all the time they need, without being interrupted, and to let other applications run they have to call explicitly some kind of "yield" function; naturally, to avoid giving the feeling of the system being stuck, well-behaved applications will yield the CPU often. Still,if there's a bug in an application (e.g. an infinite loop without yield calls) the whole system will hang, since the CPU is completely kept by the faulty program.
Almost all recent desktop OSes use preemptive multitasking, that, even if it's more expensive in terms of resources, is in general more stable (it's more difficult for a sigle faulty app to hang the whole system, since the OS is always in control). On the other hand, when the resources are tight and the application are expected to be well-behaved, cooperative multitasking is used. Windows 3 was a cooperative multitasking OS; a more recent example can be RockBox, an opensource PMP firmware replacement.
I think everyone did a good job of explaining this but I'm just gonna add little more info. in context of Linux IRQ, interrupt and kernel scheduler.
Process scheduler is the component of the OS that is responsible for deciding if current running job/process should continue to run and if not which process should run next.
preemptive scheduler is a scheduler which allows to be interrupted and a running process then can change it's state and then let another process to run (since the current one was interrupted).
On the other hand, non-preemptive scheduler can't take away CPU away from a process (aka cooperative)
FYI, the name word "cooperative" can be confusing because the word's meaning does not clearly indicate what scheduler actually does.
For example, Older Windows like 3.1 had cooperative schedulers.
Full credit to wonderful article here
I think it became preemptive from 2.6. preemptive means when a new process is ready to run, the cpu will be allocated to the new process, it doesn't need the running process be co-operative and give up the cpu.
Linux kernel is preemptive means that The kernel supports preemption.
For example, there are two processes P1(higher priority) and P2(lower priority) which are doing read system calls and they are running in kernel mode. Suppose P2 is running and is in the kernel mode and P2 is scheduled to run.
If kernel preemption is available, then preemption can happen at the kernel level i.e P2 can get preempted and but to sleep and the P1 can continue to run.
If kernel preemption is not available, since P2 is in kernel mode, system simply waits till P2 is complete and then
So I was reading about Processes and Threads and I had a question. Following is the scenario.
Uniprocessor Environment
I understand that the OS rotates the processes over processor for a particular time period.(quantum) . Now I get it when the process is single threaded, ie just one path of execution. In that case, whenever it is assigned the processor, it continues with it's execution. Let's say the process forks and or just creates a new thread. Now how does the entire process works? Is it that the OS will say to process P "Go on, continue with execution" and the Process within itself will pick the new thread or the parent thread on rotation? So that if there are more than two threads, the rotation seems fair to each thread. Or does the OS actually interacts with the threads? (In that case I am not sure what happens).
Multiprocessor Environment
Now say I have a multiprocessor environment. Now in this case, if there was just uni-threaded process, then OS will assign either of the processors to it and on it will go with it's execution. Now say, there are multiple threads in the Process. Now if I assign one of the processor to the process, and ask it to continue it's execution, and the Process has to pick either of the thread for it's execution, then there never will be parallel processing going on in that specific process. Since the process will have to put either of it's threads on the processor.
So how does it happen in both the cases?
Cheers.
Process Scheduing
Operating Systems ultimately control these types of thread scheduling.
Windows systems are priority-based and so will allow a process to consume more resources that others. This is why your machine can 'hang', if a process has been escalated to a high priority. Priorities are ranged between 1-31 as far as I know.
Mac OS / Linux / Unix are time-based, allowing all processes to have equal amounts of CPU time. Therefore loading more processes will slow your system down as they all share a smaller slice of execution time.
Uniprocessor Environment
The OS is ultimately responsible for this but switching processes involves (I cannot guarantee accuracy here, but its just an indication):
Halting a process / thread
Storing the current stack (code location)
Storing the current registers of the CPU
Asking the kernel for the next process/thread to run
Kernel indicates which one has to be run
OS reloads the registers from the cache
OS reloads the current stack for the next application.
Resumes the process
Obviously the more threads and processes you have running, the slower it will become. The problem is that the time taken to switch processes can actually take longer than the time allowed to execute the process.
Threads are just child processes of a single process. For a single processor, it just looks like additional work.
Multi-processor Environment
Multi-processor environments work differently as the cache is shared amongst processors. I believe these are called L1 (Level) and L2 caches. So the difference is that processor A can reload the state stored by processor B without conflicts. 'Hyper-threading' also has the same approach, although this is processor specific. The difference here is that a processor could solely control a specific process - this is called 'CPU Affinity' Its not encouraged for every process, but it does allow an application to have a dedicated processor to work off.
This is OS-specific, of course, but most operating systems schedule at the thread level. A process is just a grouping of threads. For example, on Linux, threads are called "tasks" and each is scheduled independently. They are created with the clone call. What is typically called a thread is a task which shares its address space (and other resources such as file descriptors, mount points, etc.) with the creating task. Note that the clone call can also create what is typically called a process if the flags to enable sharing are not passed.
Considering the above, any thread may be scheduled at any time on any processor, no matter how many processors there are available. That said, most OSs also attempt to maintain some measure of processor affinity to avoid excessive cache misses, but usually if a thread is runnable and a different CPU is available, it will change CPUs. Often there is also a way to specify which CPUs a particular thread may execute upon.
Doesn't matter whether there is 1 or 128 processors. The OS manages access to resources to try an efficiently match up requests with availabilty, and that includes CPU execution. If a thread is running, it has already managed to get some CPU but, if it requests a resource that is not immediately available, it no longer needs any CPU until that other resource does become free, and so the OS will remove CPU execution from it and, if there is another thread that is waiting for CPU, it will hand it over. When the requested reource does become available, the thread will be made ready again. If there is a core free, it will be made running 'immediately', if not, the CPU scheduling algorithm makes a decision on whether to stop a currently-running thread to free up a core or to leave the newly-ready thrad waiting.
It's better to try and ignore things like 'time-slice, quantum, priority' - it causes much confusion and FUD. If a running thread wants something it cannot have yet, it doesn't need any more CPU cycles, and the OS will take them away and, if another thread needs it, apply them there. That is why preemptive multitaskers exist - to match up threads with resources in an attempt to maximize forward progress.
I read that Linux kernel is preemptive, which is different from most Unix kernels. So, what does it really mean for a kernal to be preemptive?
Some analogies or examples would be better than pure theoretical explanation.
ADD 1 -- 11:00 AM 12/7/2018
Preemptive is just one paradigm of multi-tasking. There are others like Cooperative Multi-tasking. A better understanding can be achieved by comparing them.
Prior to Linux kernel version 2.5.4, Linux Kernel was not preemptive which means a process running in kernel mode cannot be moved out of processor until it itself leaves the processor or it starts waiting for some input output operation to get complete.
Generally a process in user mode can enter into kernel mode using system calls. Previously when the kernel was non-preemptive, a lower priority process could priority invert a higher priority process by denying it access to the processor by repeatedly calling system calls and remaining in the kernel mode. Even if the lower priority process' timeslice expired, it would continue running until it completed its work in the kernel or voluntarily relinquished control. If the higher priority process waiting to run is a text editor in which the user is typing or an MP3 player ready to refill its audio buffer, the result is poor interactive performance. This way non-preemptive kernel was a major drawback at that time.
Imagine the simple view of preemptive multi-tasking. We have two user tasks, both of which are running all the time without using any I/O or performing kernel calls. Those two tasks don't have to do anything special to be able to run on a multi-tasking operating system. The kernel, typically based on a timer interrupt, simply decides that it's time for one task to pause to let another one run. The task in question is completely unaware that anything happened.
However, most tasks make occasional requests of the kernel via syscalls. When this happens, the same user context exists, but the CPU is running kernel code on behalf of that task.
Older Linux kernels would never allow preemption of a task while it was busy running kernel code. (Note that I/O operations always voluntarily re-schedule. I'm talking about a case where the kernel code has some CPU-intensive operation like sorting a list.)
If the system allows that task to be preempted while it is running kernel code, then we have what is called a "preemptive kernel." Such a system is immune to unpredictable delays that can be encountered during syscalls, so it might be better suited for embedded or real-time tasks.
For example, if on a particular CPU there are two tasks available, and one takes a syscall that takes 5ms to complete, and the other is an MP3 player application that needs to feed the audio pipe every 2ms, you might hear stuttering audio.
The argument against preemption is that all kernel code that might be called in task context must be able to survive preemption-- there's a lot of poor device driver code, for example, that might be better off if it's always able to complete an operation before allowing some other task to run on that processor. (With multi-processor systems the rule rather than the exception these days, all kernel code must be re-entrant, so that argument isn't as relevant today.) Additionally, if the same goal could be met by improving the syscalls with bad latency, perhaps preemption is unnecessary.
A compromise is CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY, which allows a task-switch at certain points inside the kernel, but not everywhere. If there are only a small number of places where kernel code might get bogged down, this is a cheap way of reducing latency while keeping the complexity manageable.
Traditional unix kernels had a single lock, which was held by a thread while kernel code was running. Therefore no other kernel code could interrupt that thread.
This made designing the kernel easier, since you knew that while one thread using kernel resources, no other thread was. Therefore the different threads cannot mess up each others work.
In single processor systems this doesn't cause too many problems.
However in multiprocessor systems, you could have a situation where several threads on different processors or cores all wanted to run kernel code at the same time. This means that depending on the type of workload, you could have lots of processors, but all of them spend most of their time waiting for each other.
In Linux 2.6, the kernel resources were divided up into much smaller units, protected by individual locks, and the kernel code was reviewed to make sure that locks were only held while the corresponding resources were in use. So now different processors only have to wait for each other if they want access to the same resource (for example hardware resource).
The preemption allows the kernel to give the IMPRESSION of parallelism: you've got only one processor (let's say a decade ago), but you feel like all your processes are running simulaneously. That's because the kernel preempts (ie, take the execution out of) the execution from one process to give it to the next one (maybe according to their priority).
EDIT Not preemptive kernels wait for processes to give back the hand (ie, during syscalls), so if your process computes a lot of data and doesn't call any kind of yield function, the other processes won't be able to execute to execute their calls. Such systems are said to be cooperative because they ask for the cooperation of the processes to ensure the equity of the execution time
EDIT 2 The main goal of preemption is to improve the reactivity of the system among multiple tasks, so that's good for end-users, whereas on the other-hand, servers want to achieve the highest througput, so they don't need it: (from the Linux kernel configuration)
Preemptible kernel (low-latency desktop)
Voluntary kernel preemption (desktop)
No forced preemption (server)
The linux kernel is monolithic and give a little computing timespan to all the running process sequentially. It means that the processes (eg. the programs) do not run concurrently, but they are given a give timespan regularly to execute their logic. The main problem is that some logic can take longer to terminate and prevent the kernel to allow time for the next process. This results in system "lags".
A preemtive kernel has the ability to switch context. It means that it can stop a "hanging" process even if it is not finished, and give the computing time to the next process as expected. The "hanging" process will continue to execute when its time has come without any problem.
Practically, it means that the kernel has the ability to achieve tasks in realtime, which is particularly interesting for audio recording and editing.
The ubuntu studio districution packages a preemptive kernel as well as a buch of quality free software devoted to audio and video edition.
It means that the operating system scheduler is free to suspend the execution of the running processes to give the CPU to another process whenever it wants; the normal way to do this is to give to each process that is waiting for the CPU a "quantum" of CPU time to run. After it has expired the scheduler takes back the control (and the running process cannot avoid this) to give another quantum to another process.
This method is often compared with the cooperative multitasking, in which processes keep the CPU for all the time they need, without being interrupted, and to let other applications run they have to call explicitly some kind of "yield" function; naturally, to avoid giving the feeling of the system being stuck, well-behaved applications will yield the CPU often. Still,if there's a bug in an application (e.g. an infinite loop without yield calls) the whole system will hang, since the CPU is completely kept by the faulty program.
Almost all recent desktop OSes use preemptive multitasking, that, even if it's more expensive in terms of resources, is in general more stable (it's more difficult for a sigle faulty app to hang the whole system, since the OS is always in control). On the other hand, when the resources are tight and the application are expected to be well-behaved, cooperative multitasking is used. Windows 3 was a cooperative multitasking OS; a more recent example can be RockBox, an opensource PMP firmware replacement.
I think everyone did a good job of explaining this but I'm just gonna add little more info. in context of Linux IRQ, interrupt and kernel scheduler.
Process scheduler is the component of the OS that is responsible for deciding if current running job/process should continue to run and if not which process should run next.
preemptive scheduler is a scheduler which allows to be interrupted and a running process then can change it's state and then let another process to run (since the current one was interrupted).
On the other hand, non-preemptive scheduler can't take away CPU away from a process (aka cooperative)
FYI, the name word "cooperative" can be confusing because the word's meaning does not clearly indicate what scheduler actually does.
For example, Older Windows like 3.1 had cooperative schedulers.
Full credit to wonderful article here
I think it became preemptive from 2.6. preemptive means when a new process is ready to run, the cpu will be allocated to the new process, it doesn't need the running process be co-operative and give up the cpu.
Linux kernel is preemptive means that The kernel supports preemption.
For example, there are two processes P1(higher priority) and P2(lower priority) which are doing read system calls and they are running in kernel mode. Suppose P2 is running and is in the kernel mode and P2 is scheduled to run.
If kernel preemption is available, then preemption can happen at the kernel level i.e P2 can get preempted and but to sleep and the P1 can continue to run.
If kernel preemption is not available, since P2 is in kernel mode, system simply waits till P2 is complete and then
Sometimes whenever I write a program in Linux and it crashes due to a bug of some sort, it will become an uninterruptible process and continue running forever until I restart my computer (even if I log out). My questions are:
What causes a process to become uninterruptible?
How do I stop that from happening?
This is probably a dumb question, but is there any way to interrupt it without restarting my computer?
An uninterruptible process is a process which happens to be in a system call (kernel function) that cannot be interrupted by a signal.
To understand what that means, you need to understand the concept of an interruptible system call. The classic example is read(). This is a system call that can take a long time (seconds) since it can potentially involve spinning up a hard drive, or moving heads. During most of this time, the process will be sleeping, blocking on the hardware.
While the process is sleeping in the system call, it can receive a Unix asynchronous signal (say, SIGTERM), then the following happens:
The system call exits prematurely, and is set up to return -EINTR to user space.
The signal handler is executed.
If the process is still running, it gets the return value from the system call, and it can make the same call again.
Returning early from the system call enables the user space code to immediately alter its behavior in response to the signal. For example, terminating cleanly in reaction to SIGINT or SIGTERM.
On the other hand, some system calls are not allowed to be interrupted in this way. If the system calls stalls for some reason, the process can indefinitely remains in this unkillable state.
LWN ran a nice article that touched this topic in July.
To answer the original question:
How to prevent this from happening: figure out which driver is causing you trouble, and either stop using, or become a kernel hacker and fix it.
How to kill an uninterruptible process without rebooting: somehow make the system call terminate. Frequently the most effective manner to do this without hitting the power switch is to pull the power cord. You can also become a kernel hacker and make the driver use TASK_KILLABLE, as explained in the LWN article.
When a process is on user mode, it can be interrupted at any time (switching to kernel mode). When the kernel returns to user mode, it checks if there are any signals pending (including the ones which are used to kill the process, such as SIGTERM and SIGKILL). This means a process can be killed only on return to user mode.
The reason a process cannot be killed in kernel mode is that it could potentially corrupt the kernel structures used by all the other processes in the same machine (the same way killing a thread can potentially corrupt data structures used by other threads in the same process).
When the kernel needs to do something which could take a long time (waiting on a pipe written by another process or waiting for the hardware to do something, for instance), it sleeps by marking itself as sleeping and calling the scheduler to switch to another process (if there is no non-sleeping process, it switches to a "dummy" process which tells the cpu to slow down a bit and sits in a loop — the idle loop).
If a signal is sent to a sleeping process, it has to be woken up before it will return to user space and thus process the pending signal. Here we have the difference between the two main types of sleep:
TASK_INTERRUPTIBLE, the interruptible sleep. If a task is marked with this flag, it is sleeping, but can be woken by signals. This means the code which marked the task as sleeping is expecting a possible signal, and after it wakes up will check for it and return from the system call. After the signal is handled, the system call can potentially be automatically restarted (and I won't go into details on how that works).
TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE, the uninterruptible sleep. If a task is marked with this flag, it is not expecting to be woken up by anything other than whatever it is waiting for, either because it cannot easily be restarted, or because programs are expecting the system call to be atomic. This can also be used for sleeps known to be very short.
TASK_KILLABLE (mentioned in the LWN article linked to by ddaa's answer) is a new variant.
This answers your first question. As to your second question: you can't avoid uninterruptible sleeps, they are a normal thing (it happens, for instance, every time a process reads/writes from/to the disk); however, they should last only a fraction of a second. If they last much longer, it usually means a hardware problem (or a device driver problem, which looks the same to the kernel), where the device driver is waiting for the hardware to do something which will never happen. It can also mean you are using NFS and the NFS server is down (it is waiting for the server to recover; you can also use the "intr" option to avoid the problem).
Finally, the reason you cannot recover is the same reason the kernel waits until return to user mode to deliver a signal or kill the process: it would potentially corrupt the kernel's data structures (code waiting on an interruptible sleep can receive an error which tells it to return to user space, where the process can be killed; code waiting on an uninterruptible sleep is not expecting any error).
Uninterruptable processes are USUALLY waiting for I/O following a page fault.
Consider this:
The thread tries to access a page which is not in core (either an executable which is demand-loaded, a page of anonymous memory which has been swapped out, or a mmap()'d file which is demand loaded, which are much the same thing)
The kernel is now (trying to) load it in
The process can't continue until the page is available.
The process/task cannot be interrupted in this state, because it can't handle any signals; if it did, another page fault would happen and it would be back where it was.
When I say "process", I really mean "task", which under Linux (2.6) roughly translates to "thread" which may or may not have an individual "thread group" entry in /proc
In some cases, it may be waiting for a long time. A typical example of this would be where the executable or mmap'd file is on a network filesystem where the server has failed. If the I/O eventually succeeds, the task will continue. If it eventually fails, the task will generally get a SIGBUS or something.
To your 3rd question:
I think you can kill the uninterruptable processes by running
sudo kill -HUP 1.
It will restart init without ending the running processes and after running it, my uninterruptable processes were gone.
If you are talking about a "zombie" process (which is designated as "zombie" in ps output), then this is a harmless record in the process list waiting for someone to collect its return code and it could be safely ignored.
Could you please describe what and "uninterruptable process" is for you? Does it survives the "kill -9 " and happily chugs along? If that is the case, then it's stuck on some syscall, which is stuck in some driver, and you are stuck with this process till reboot (and sometimes it's better to reboot soon) or unloading of relevant driver (which is unlikely to happen). You could try to use "strace" to find out where your process is stuck and avoid it in the future.