Re: per-thread rusage

["Ulrich Drepper" <drepper@gmail.com>]

On 5/1/07, Theodore Tso <tytso@mit.edu> wrote:
> The question is should we use setrlimit() to set the per-thread CPU
> limit, given that we would need some separate interface to set signal
> that should be sent.
>
> Is there any reason why we should have the interface specify whether
> the signal should be directed to a specified process or kernel
> thread-id, perhaps using si_pid field in the siginfo_t to specify
> which thread had exceeded its CPU limit.  Or would this be overkill?

The more I think about it the more complex it gets.  There is a
problem with delivering the signal to the receiving process itself: it
is out of time and cannot perform the cleanup operation anymore.  You
could grant it a grace period but how long should that be?  Some of
the cleanup handlers might take a long time.  If you don't enforce the
CPU limit then it doesn't have to be in the kernel and you might as
well use CLOCK_THREAD_CPUTIME_ID and create a timer.  This should
already work today.  If not it must be fixed.

Delivering the timeout signal to another thread isn't really possible
either since the cleanup code might access thread-local data which
wouldn't work since it's not the canceled thread's data which is
accessed.

I don't have a good answer right now whether enforced CPU limits can
be implemented at all.  But it seems for your purposes a timer with
the CPU clock might be sufficient.


> Do you think this is something that we could get standardized into an
> upcoming Posix/Posix Threads standard?

Regardless of whether a solution can be found, it's too late for the
next revision.  The deadline for new features is long gone by.