Evaluating Operating System Performance

EVALUATING OPERATING SYSTEM PERFORMANCE:

The scheduling policy does not tell us all that we would like to know about the performance of a real system running processes. Our analysis of scheduling policies makes some simplifying assumptions:

1. We have assumed that context switches require zero time. Although it is often reasonable to neglect context switch time when it is much smaller than the process execution time, context switching can add significant delay in some cases.

2. We have assumed that we know the execution time of the processes. In fact, we learned in Section 5.6 that program time is not a single number, but can be bounded by worst-case and best-case execution times.

3. We probably determined worst-case or best-case times for the processes in isolation. But, in fact, they interact with each other in the cache. Cache conflicts among processes can drastically degrade process execution time.

The zero-time context switch assumption used in the analysis of RMS is not correct—we must execute instructions to save and restore context, and we must execute additional instructions to implement the scheduling policy. On the other hand, context switching can be implemented efficiently—context switching need not kill performance.

The effects of nonzero context switching time must be carefully analyzed in the context of a particular implementation to be sure that the predictions of an ideal scheduling policy are sufficiently accurate.

In most real-time operating systems, a context switch requires only a few hundred instructions, with only slightly more overhead for a simple real-time scheduler like RMS. When the overhead time is very small relative to the task periods, then the zero-time context switch assumption is often a reasonable approximation. Problems are most likely to manifest themselves in the highest-rate processes, which are often the most critical in any case.

Completely checking that all deadlines will be met with nonzero context switching time requires checking all possible schedules for processes and including the context switch time at each preemption or process initiation. However, assuming an average number of context switches per process and computing CPU utilization can provide at least an estimate of how close the system is to CPU capacity.