Red Hat Has Been Working On "stalld" As A Thread Stall Detector + Booster

Written by Michael Larabel in Red Hat on 31 August 2020 at 10:11 AM EDT. 13 Comments
RED HAT
Red Hat engineers in recent weeks began working on a new project called "starved" though recently renamed to "stalld". The stalld service is for serving as a Linux thread stall detector.

The stalld daemon monitors Linux threads and detects when threads are stalled as a result of CPU starvation. The stalled thread is in turn boosted by stalld by setting the SCHED_DEADLINE policy and then the original policy restored following the boost.

Stalld supports a configurable value when trying to find threads that are ready but have not been granted CPU time for that defined period. Stalld also supports configuring an aggressive mode, configurable values for the time to set SCHED_DEADLINE on the thread, and various logging capabilities. There is an optional systemd service file for running this starvation monitoring service.

Stalld has just been under development in the past number of weeks but is already proving useful and is currently awaiting review for eventual introduction on Fedora. The code to Stalld is available from Kernel.org for those interested in this new starvation monitoring service for Linux systems.
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