Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System

Till Straumann <[email protected]> · Tue, 26 Nov 2002 19:54:52 -0800

Eric Norum wrote:

On Tuesday, November 26, 2002, at 06:09  PM, Till Straumann wrote:

Here's yet another idea how the runaway-task problem could be solved.

AFAIK, most OS provide a hook into the system timer ISR but not

into the console ISR [which makes what we discussed at JLAB less

portable] - these hooks are vxWorks' watchdog timers, RTEMS'

rtems_timers.

1) The shell task periodically resets (pets) a 'watchdog' counter.

How would this mesh with libtecla/libreadline? The shell task spends

most of its time blocked in these libraries waiting for input. How

could it reset the watchdog timer? (First person that says 'select'

gets a big raspberry from me!!!!)

It was only a _sketch_ not an implementation proposal.

In a real implementation you would have a dedicated task doing the

petting rather than hacking the shell.

That task would get its priority raised by the ISR and it would
in turn propagate its new priority to the shell. (Again, this is not

a real/detailed implementation design [e.g. it's not documented whether

it is safe for RTEMS ISRs to change task priorities].)

Anyways, the hi-priority task runaway protection business is IMO

unnecessary. These specialized tasks should be fairly simple and

runaway programming errors rare and easy to find.

What about this other issue: what was the reason for not making the
OS' full range of priorities available to EpicsThreads? After all,
having the 92..100 window available doesn't really help if there
are system tasks out there at 150... Handling priorities in a
hard-RT-OSI way is not entirely trivial, it seems.

-- Till

2) A timer ISR increments 'watchdog'. Should 'watchdog' reach a critical
   'limit', this implies that the shell had no chance to pet.
   In this case, the ISR increments the task's priority and resets
   'watchdog'.

If a task with a priority > shell runs away, 2) will eventually raise

the shell's priority above the runaway task's and the user will regain

control.

Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System

Experimental Physics and
Industrial Control System