Windows® Internals, Sixth Edition, Part 1

Finally, the kernel initializes threaded DPC support for the processor and adjusts exported kernel variables to report the new processor. Different memory-manager masks and process seeds based on processor counts are also updated, and processor features need to be updated for the new processor to match the rest of the system (for example, enabling virtualization support on the newly added processor). The initialization sequence completes with the notification to the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA) component that a new processor is online.

The HAL is also involved in this process. It is called once to start the dynamic processor after the kernel is aware of it, and it is called again after the kernel has finished initialization of the processor. However, these notifications and callbacks only make the kernel aware and respond to processor changes. Although an additional processor increases the throughput of the kernel, it does nothing to help drivers.

To handle drivers, the system has a new default executive callback object, the ProcessorAdd callback, that drivers can register with for notifications. Similar to the callbacks that notify drivers of power state or system time changes, this callback allows driver code to, for example, create a new worker thread if desirable so that it can handle more work at the same time.

Once drivers are notified, the final kernel component called is the Plug and Play manager, which adds the processor to the system’s device node and rebalances interrupts so that the new processor can handle interrupts that were already registered for other processors. CPU-hungry applications are also able to take advantage of newer processors as well.

However, a sudden change of affinity can have potentially breaking changes for a running application (especially when going from a single-processor to a multiprocessor environment) through the appearance of potential race conditions or simply misdistribution of work (because the process might have calculated the perfect ratios at startup, based on the number of CPUs it was aware of). As a result, applications do not take advantage of a dynamically added processor by default—they must request it.

The Windows APIs SetProcessAffinityUpdateMode and QueryProcessAffinityMode (which use the undocumented NtSet/QueryInformationProcess system call) tell the process manager that these applications should have their affinity updated (by setting the AffinityUpdateEnable flag in EPROCESS), or that they do not want to deal with affinity updates (by setting the AffinityPermanent flag in EPROCESS). Once an application has told the system that its affinity is permanent, it cannot later change its mind and request affinity updates, so this is a one-time change.

As part of KeStartDynamicProcessor, a new step has been added after interrupts are rebalanced, which is to call the process manager to perform affinity updates through PsUpdateActiveProcessAffinity. Some Windows core processes and services already have affinity updates enabled, while third-party software will need to be recompiled to take advantage of the new API call. The System process, Svchost processes, and Smss are all compatible with dynamic processor addition.

Job Objects

A job object is a nameable, securable, shareable kernel object that allows control of one or more processes as a group. A job object’s basic function is to allow groups of processes to be managed and manipulated as a unit. A process can be a member of only one job object. By default, its association with the job object can’t be broken and all processes created by the process and its descendants are associated with the same job object as well. The job object also records basic accounting information for all processes associated with the job and for all processes that were associated with the job but have since terminated.

Jobs can also be associated with an I/O completion port object, which other threads might be waiting for, with the Windows GetQueuedCompletionStatus function. This allows interested parties (typically, the job creator) to monitor for limit violation and events that could affect the job’s security (such as a new process being created or a process abnormally exiting).

Job Limits

The following are some of the CPU-related and memory-related limits you can specify for a job:

Maximum number of active processes. Limits the number of concurrently existing processes in the job.