Work Is Back Underway On A Task Isolation Interface For The Linux Kernel

Red Hat's Marcelo Tosatti has submitted his latest patches implementing a basic task isolation interface for the Linux kernel that would be particularly useful for real-time workloads and high-bandwidth networking applications making use of user-space drivers.

In an effort to eliminate or at least lower operating system noise for relevant user-space applications, this task isolation interface could be used for letting the kernel know that latency-sensitive code is being executed. Applications would notify the kernel via new prctl() options "PR_ISOL_*".

This task isolation interface would allow specifying kernel activities that could be quiesced/silenced with the initial option being around virtual memory statistics to avoid interruptions.

If this sort of task isolation interface would be of interest to you for helping to cut down on OS noise, see this patch series with the included documentation for more details on this current proposal. The work is still under active discussion so we'll see where it leads and in what form it may ultimately get picked up for the mainline kernel.