Contents: Summary | Download | Documentation | Example | FAQ

Hourglass

Summary

Hourglass is a synthetic real-time application that can be used to learn how CPU scheduling in a general-purpose operating system works at microsecond and millisecond granularities. Its distinguishing features are:

A paper about Hourglass was presented at the FREENIX track of the USENIX Technical Conference in Monterey, CA in June 2002. The paper contains fairly detailed information about how Hourglass works, and how to use it.

Doug Locke mentioned Hourglass in an article at Linuxdevices.

Download

Hourglass is distributed under a BSD-style license:

If you find Hourglass to be useful, please drop me a line letting me know. Better yet, also let me know who you are, where you work, and what you are using it for. I'm very busy doing professor types of things and feedback like this is the only thing that will motivate me to produce new releases.

This release should compile on any reasonably recent Linux or Cygwin installation. On FreeBSD, Linuxthreads are required. Hourglass has been tested on MacOS X, Fedora Core 6, various versions of Redhat Linux, FreeBSD-4.5, and Windows 2000 and XP. Pentium-class Intel and AMD chips are supported, as are PowerPC chips.

Old releases of Hourglass are available here, but I do not expect them to be of much interest.

As part of the Bossa project, Julia Lawall has modified Hourglass to work with Bossa. The modified version can be downloaded from their site.

Documentation

The FREENIX paper contains fairly detailed information about how to use Hourglass. Also, running Hourglass without any options causes it to print some usage information. A real user manual would be nice, but who has time to write one?

Example

This figure shows 25ms segments of three execution traces taken by Hourglass on a Linux box while (1) it receives full-bandwidth data over 100 Mbps Ethernet, and (2) a real-time thread attempts to receive 4ms of CPU time during each 5ms period. This models a demanding application such as professional quality real-time audio processing. On plain Linux, receive processing interferes with the thread to a large extent, and it misses lots of deadlines. On Linux patched with Robert Love's preemptible kernel and lock breaking patches, the 5ms periodic structure of the application is more apparent, and although there is still a lot of interference the application meets most of its deadlines. The TimeSys Linux/GPL kernel almost completely respects the user's choice to run a thread in preference to kernel activity, and therefore in this case all deadlines are met. This example and lots of others are covered in the Hourglass FREENIX paper.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Why does Hourglass print "oops: no trace records left - exiting"?

A: Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons why this can occur. The first possibility is that Hourglass is legitimately running out of trace buffers -- this can happen on long Hourglass runs, or on runs taken where many gaps are detected. The number of trace records can be increased using the -e command line option.

The second possibility is that something is going wrong, causing Hourglass to eat up many more trace records than it should. First, make sure that Hourglass is correctly estimating the frequency of the timestamp counter on your processor -- look at the reported MHz value near the top of the Hourglass output. Second, on slow computers and/or when Hourglass is compiled without optimizations, it is possible that Hourglass is incorrectly detecting gaps between successive iterations of the execution trace loop -- this will very quickly eat up the trace record buffer. To fix this, first compile Hourglass with "-O3" to gain the benefits of inlining in the critical loop of the execution trace algorithm, and second, consider increasing the gap threshold value using the "-g" command line option. This threshold determines the smallest gap between successive iterations of the execution trace loop that will be logged to the trace buffer. Its default value of 5us seems to be a good choice on modern machines that run at a few hundred MHz or more. The short document CALIBRATING in the Hourglass root directory contains some more detail about this.

Q: Why is Hourglass not correctly determining the frequency of the timestamp counter on my machine?

A: Some processors dynamically change their clock speed, and unfortunately this sometimes affects the timestamp counter as well. Laptops are particularly problematic. There's probably no portable solution to this problem, so consider using the "-M" command line option to manually set the frequency of the timestamp counter. In general this manual fix is only useful if your processor actually has a constant-rate timestamp counter but Hourglass somehow fails to measure it accurately. If your CPU varies the frequency of the timestamp counter during an Hourglass run, then Hourglass will silently return incorrect results.

Q: I'm trying to create a graphical execution trace but jgraph doesn't seem to be working. What's up?

A: Try recompiling jgraph with -DLCC on the cc command line.

Q: On RedHat Linux 7.3 why do threads that are assigned real-time priority not seem to be running in preference to threads in the time-sharing class?

A: The kernel used by RedHat 7.3 (2.4.18-4) is broken with respect to SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR. The function sched_setscheduler() silently fails to have any effect on this kernel. I suggest downloading and building a fresh 2.4.18 kernel. Also, it would not hurt to send a complaint to RedHat -- silent failure of real-time features is a bad thing!



regehr@cs.utah.edu