[Tinyos-devel] Request for comments on TEP 106

[John Regehr]

Hi TinyOS folks,

I have been asked to help shepherd TEP 106 on scheduling.  This TEP 
concerns not only the semantics of the built-in TinyOS 1 and TinyOS 2 
schedulers and tasks, but also the pluggable scheduler interface in 
TinyOS 2.

I am particularly interested in the following kinds of facts and opinions:

- Does the TEP clearly explain the old and new semantics?

- Experience with the TinyOS 2 task scheduler -- how is using the
   new "reserved scheduler slot per task" model vs. the old model where
   posts could fail if the task queue filled up?

- Experience with the TinyOS 2 scheduler interface: What scheduler did
   you implement?  Did it solve the problem?  What new parameters did
   the scheduler require and how did you compute them?

- Concrete examples where TinyOS 1.x and 2.x fails to meet either
   hardware-level or application-level timing constraints or QoS
   requirements.

- Thoughts on whether the TEP should explicitly address support for
   scheduling tools that, for example, compute task priorities at
   compile time.

A current draft of this TEP can be found here:

http://tinyos.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/tinyos/tinyos-2.x/doc/html/tep106.html

(Stealing text from Matt Welsh:) Getting feedback from other TinyOS 
developers on this document is essential to moving the TEP process 
forward. I would appreciate it if I could get a couple of volunteers to 
read over this TEP and submit comments back to me. I will work with the 
authors of the TEP to revise the proposal based on your comments.

Please send any comments directly to me.

Thanks for your help,

John Regehr