Chapter 1. Before You Start Tuning Your Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time System

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time is designed to be used on well-tuned systems for applications with extremely high determinism requirements. Kernel system tuning offers the vast majority of the improvement in determinism. For example, in many workloads thorough system tuning improves consistency of results by around 90%. This is why we typically recommend that customers first perform the Chapter 2, General System Tuning of standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux before using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time.

Things to Remember While You Are Tuning Your Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time Kernel

  1. Be Patient
    Real-time tuning is an iterative process; you will almost never be able to tweak a few variables and know that the change is the best that can be achieved. Be prepared to spend days or weeks narrowing down the set of tunings that work best for your system.
    Additionally, always make long test runs. Changing some tuning parameters then doing a five minute test run is not a good validation of a set of tunes. Make the length of your test runs adjustable and run them for longer than a few minutes. Try to narrow down to a few different tuning sets with test runs of a few hours, then run those sets for many hours or days at a time, to try and catch corner-cases of max latencies or resource exhaustion.
  2. Be Accurate
    Build a measurement mechanism into your application, so that you can accurately gauge how a particular set of tuning changes affect the application's performance. Anecdotal evidence (for example, "The mouse moves more smoothly") is usually wrong and varies from person to person. Do hard measurements and record them for later analysis.
  3. Be Methodical
    It is very tempting to make multiple changes to tuning variables between test runs, but doing so means that you do not have a way to narrow down which tune affected your test results. Keep the tuning changes between test runs as small as you can.
  4. Be Conservative
    It is also tempting to make large changes when tuning, but it is almost always better to make incremental changes. You will find that working your way up from the lowest to highest priority values will yield better results in the long run.
  5. Be Smart
    Use the tools you have available. The Tuna graphical tuning tool makes it easy to change processor affinities for threads and interrupts, thread priorities and to isolate processors for application use. The taskset and chrt command line utilities allow you to do most of what Tuna does. If you run into performance problems, the ftrace and perf tools can help locate latency issues.
  6. Be Flexible
    Rather than hard-coding values into your application, use external tools to change policy, priority and affinity. This allows you to try many different combinations and simplifies your logic. Once you have found some settings that give good results, you can either add them to your application, or set up some startup logic to implement the settings when the application starts.
Scheduling Policies

Linux uses three main scheduling policies:

SCHED_OTHER (sometimes called SCHED_NORMAL)
This is the default thread policy and has dynamic priority controlled by the kernel. The priority is changed based on thread activity. Threads with this policy are considered to have a real-time priority of 0 (zero).
SCHED_FIFO (First in, first out)
A real-time policy with a priority range of from 1 - 99, with 1 being the lowest and 99 the highest. SCHED_FIFO threads always have a higher priority than SCHED_OTHER threads (for example, a SCHED_FIFO thread with a priority of 1 will have a higher priority than any SCHED_OTHER thread). Any thread created as a SCHED_FIFO thread has a fixed priority and will run until it is blocked or preempted by a higher priority thread.
SCHED_RR (Round-Robin)
SCHED_RR is a modification of SCHED_FIFO. Threads with the same priority have a quantum and are round-robin scheduled among all equal priority SCHED_RR threads. This policy is rarely used.