A measurement-based analysis of the real-time performance of linux
Luca Abeni, Ashvin Goel, Charles Krasic, J. Snow, Jonathan Walpole · 2003
This paper presents an experimental study of the latency behavior of the Linux OS. We identify major sources of latency in the kernel with the goal of providing real-time performance in a widely used general-purpose operating system. We quantify, each source of latency with a series of micro-benchmarks and also evaluate the effects of latency on a time-sensitive application. Our analysis shows that there are two main causes of latency in the OS: tinier resolution and non-preemptable sections. Our experiments show that in the standard Linux kernel the tinier resolution latency is predominant, and generally hides the non-preemptable section latency We use accurate timers to reduce timer resolution latency and then analyze the non-preemptable section latency for several variants of Linux.