Locked tasks

[Kamen Penev]

Chris Johns wrote:

> Angelo Fraietta wrote:
>
>> Is there a way to use timeslices so a task never gets all cpu usage?
>
>
> The classic API has a timeslice option. I am not sure about the POSIX 
> or ITRON APIs.


The POSIX API provides a richer selection of timeslicing behaviors than 
the classic API. The difference is in what happens after a timesliced 
task gets preempted by a higher-priority task before exhausting its 
timeslice and later regains control. The only behavior available through 
the classic API is that the timeslice of this task gets reset to the 
initial value. With the Posix API, in addition to this behavior you can 
also specify that the task should resume with what's left of its 
original timeslice.

This was crucial in my application. I have 5 low-priority tasks that I 
want to round-robin with a timeslice of 40ms and a high-priority, 
high-frequency(8kHz) task. I set this up with the classic API, but to my 
surprise, only one of the 5 lo-priority  tasks was ever getting any CPU 
(besides the 8kHz task, of course).

What puzzled me even more was that the 5 low-priority tasks would 
happily work together, as long as the 8kHz task was not running. What 
was happening was that one of the 5 was getting preempted by the 8kHz 
task and then when it got back control its clock budget was being reset 
back to 40ms!!! It never ran out of time.

I switched to the Posix API for creating the 5 tasks, which allowed me 
to modify the timeslicing behavior, and now everything is fine.

Kamen