Hi all,
I am writing in relation to a new package I would like to submit to Factory, called stalld.
It contains a very small user-space utility that watches for specific threads that are starved by other higher priority processes, and gives them a temporary priority boost. This is particularly useful when one or two RT processes take exclusive use of CPU cores, but essential housekeeping kernel threads might get blocked by them, resulting in an unresponsive system. The fundamental goal is similar to the real-time scheduler throttling, but it allows for a much more fine-grained control. This is considered by some people to be a mandatory safety net in production.
More information here: https://gitlab.com/rt-linux-tools/stalld/-/blob/main/README.md?ref_type=head...
The original stalld project also contains an experimental in-kernel control logic based on eBPF, which is currently disabled in this package, although this might change in the future.
Any feedback is welcome.
Kind regards,
Marco