OLA Thread Scheduling

Since 0.9.4, OLA provides options to control the thread scheduling algorithms, when supported by the host kernel.

Besides the default scheduling policy (SCHED_OTHER), OLA supports SCHED_RR and SCHED_FIFO. You can read about the differences on The Linux Journal.

Configuration

If you're on Linux you need to edit /etc/security/limits.conf and add:

<username>            hard    rtprio   99
<username>            soft    rtprio   50

Replace <username> with the user you run olad as.

Running OLA

Start olad with --scheduler-policy and --scheduler-priority. You must provide both flags.

$ olad --scheduler-policy fifo --scheduler-priority 10

The --scheduler-priority flag must be a value less than or equal to the soft rtprio limit set in /etc/security/limits.conf.

Results

The test setup was as follows:

• Intel i5-3450, running Debian Wheezy, set to send ArtNet traffic on universe 1
• Raspberry Pi, configured to receive ArtNet traffic and convert to sACN traffic on universe 1.
• Both hosts connect to a netgear 5 port switch. The Pi was connected at 100Mbps, the Debian host at 1Gbps.

On the Debian host, the traffic was generated with:

$  i=0; while :; do echo "$i"; i=$((i+1)); if [ $i == 256 ] ; then i=0; fi ; sleep 0.025; done | ola_streaming_client  -u 1

And the packets captured with:

tcpdump  -n '(port 5568 or port 6454)  and (dst host 239.255.0.1 or dst host 192.168.3.115)' -c 10000 -s0 -w /tmp/savefile-fifo

On the Pi, the control was with no scheduling options. Then the fifo scheduler was enabled with

$ olad  --scheduler-policy fifo --scheduler-priority 10

From the tcpdump, we can find the time between sending the ArtNet packet and receiving the E1.31 packet, and then plot these on a histogram:

Scheduler	Mean (ms)	Standard Deviation	90 percentile (ms)	99 percentile (ms)	99.9 percentile (ms)	Max (ms)
Control	0.880 ms	5.64791e-02	0.920 ms	1.018 ms	1.842 ms	2.252 ms
Fifo	0.868 ms	2.819106e-02	0.909 ms	0.958 ms	1.010 ms	1.132 ms