Tag: real-time

Real-Time Tuning

I tried a number of things that are supposed to improve real-time performance, as described in this forum post.

But not much changed. This series of jitter-histograms shows little or no changes:

0 1 2 3 4

The things I tried are roughly

  1. measure first latency histogram 0.png
  2. uninstall the package irqbalance using synaptic. reboot.
  3. measure 1.png
  4. in /etc/default/grub modify GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="isolcpus=1 acpi_irq_nobalance noirqbalance"  (Aside: why are the files in /etc/grub.d/ made so incredibly hard to read? Someone should re-write them in Python!). Run sudo update-grub. reboot.
  5. measure 2.png
  6. Add irq-affinity.conf to /etc/init/
  7. Add set-irq-affinity and watchirqs to /usr/local/sbin. reboot
  8. measure 3.png
  9. Try to tweak BIOS settings. Turn off power-saving features, etc.
  10. measure 4.png

The output of watchirqs looks like this:

watchirqs_before_boot watchirqs_last

The scripts mentioned above: irqstuff

Why Real-Time?

Why bother with these real-time kernels and APIs at all? Isn't timing on a modern PC good enough? Look at this:

This histogram shows latency-numbers from the same 1ms thread test run compiled without (red) and with (green) real-time enabled. All the green real-time data clusters around zero +/- 20us. Without real-time enabled the event we are expecting to happen every 1 ms might happen almost 1 ms too early, or up to 3 ms late. With real-time the timing is mostly consistent to better than 1% (10 us) with a worst-case jitter of 2% (20 us).