Re: [PATCH] Nick's scheduler policy v12

[Robert Love]

On Fri, 2003-09-05 at 16:39, Mike Fedyk wrote:

> Exactly.  Because the larger time slices for lower nice values came from
> O(1), not Con.

The larger timeslices may not help, but one reason why renicing X hurts
multimedia is that it gives a preference to the GUI over the multimedia
thread(s).

Look at it this way.  Assume renicing X does not _help_ whatever the
problem is (simply because the problem, in this case, is not stemming
from X).  Then giving X the higher priority and larger timeslice only
adversely affects the problem.

So, since the multimedia thread in (say) xmms is really unrelated to X
(its a separate thread and not doing any Xlib calls), it just hurts it.

> Linus added a patch to 2.5.65 or so that was supposed to allow nice 0 on X
> without any detrament.

That is the backboost thing.  It was ripped out, due to regressions in
SETI and elsewhere.

Nick added a similar thing back in, but he just removed it.  Its a shame
it cannot be made to work, because I like the idea.  I talked with Nick
and OLS about the ability of a forward+back boost combination to solve
our interactivity issues.  I really wish they panned out.

	Robert Love


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