Re: Ingo Molnar and Con Kolivas 2.6 scheduler patches

From: George Anzinger
Date: Thu Aug 14 2003 - 03:06:51 EST


Rob Landley wrote:
On Saturday 09 August 2003 16:52, George Anzinger wrote:

Ed Sweetman wrote:

the problem is you want a process that works like it was run on a single
tasking OS on an operating system that is built from the ground up to be
a multi-user multi-tasking OS


Considering the multi-tasking OS has 1000 times the CPU power, memory, and disk space as the single-tasking OS did when it debuted, yet still loses to it in some areas, isn't it at least worth looking at?


and you want both to work perfectly at peak performance


We're pondering various heuristics with which to to improve the situation and you say we're persuing perfection. From heuristics.

Do you say these sort of things to the virtual memory people? (Since you can't do it perfectly, why bother to swap at all? The perfect being the enemy of the good, and all that.)


and you want it to know when you want which to work at
peak performance automatically.


I know for a fact that automatic determination of interactivity is possible. In OS/2 you could speed up a compile by moving the mouse pointer over its window repeatedly to give it extra clock ticks. (So far we've managed to avoid anything quite so disgusting in Linux, but there exist OSes where it was done. Having the keyboard and mouse and display be local devices is actually the common case. It took X about ten years to finally start optimizing for the common case on the output side with MIT shared memory extensions and such...)

The scheduler actually has a lot of information to work with. Ingo's patches strive to give it more information, and and Con's patches make much better use of that information. This is a good thing.


Well said :)


Actually, I didn't really consider that list of straw man arguments to be worth commenting on the first time around. (I thought he was being sarcastic...)

Well, I think he was too, but I am trying to say (as I think you are too) that it is not far from being a realistic goal.

As to timing, I just changed ISPs and was off line for a few days...


--
George Anzinger george@xxxxxxxxxx
High-res-timers: http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/
Preemption patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml


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