Re: [PATCH] Minor scheduler fix to get rid of skipping in xmms

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Sun Sep 07 2003 - 00:09:10 EST




Robert Love wrote:

On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 14:17, John Yau wrote:


Scratch that, I just found Ingo's patch. My patch does essentially the same
thing except it only allows the current active process to be preempted if it
got demoted in priority during the effective priority recalculation. This
IMHO is better because it doesn't do unnecessary context switches. If the
process were truly a CPU hog relative other processes on the run queue, then
it'd get preempted eventually when it gets demoted rather than always every
25 ms.


The rationale behind Ingo's patch is to "break up" the timeslices to
give better scheduling latency to multiple tasks at the same priority. So it is not "unnecessary context switches," just "extra context
switches."

It also recalculates the process's effective priority, like yours does,
so it also has the same advantage as your patch: to more quickly detect
tasks that have changed in interactivity, and to handle that.

Not sure which approach is better. Only testing will tell.


How come Ingo's granular timeslice patch didn't get put into 2.6.0-test4?


Interactivity improvements are currently a contentious issue. The patch
is back in 2.6-mm, though.


Although I think what is less contentious is that Con's stuff is an improvement over the 2.6 tree, and the consensus is that _something_
as to be done to it. So it is quite sad that the scheduler in 2.6 is
sitting there doing nothing but waiting to be obsoleted, while Con's
good (and begnin) scheduler patches are waiting around and getting
less than 1% of the testing they need.


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