Re: XFS for 2.4

[davidsen@tmr.com (bill davidsen)]

In article <20031203204518.GA11325@alpha.home.local> you write:
| On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 07:01:39PM +0000, bill davidsen wrote:
|  
| > Yes, a development tree is much different than a stable tree, and even
| > though the number has gone to 2.6, it's very much a development tree, in
| > that it's still being used by the same people, and probably not getting
| > a lot of new testing. Stability is unlikely to be production quality
| > until fixes go in for problems in mass testing, which won't happen until
| > it shows up in a vendor release, which won't happen until the vendors
| > test and clean up what they find... In other words, I don't expect it to
| > be "really stable" for six months at least, maybe a year.
| 
| There even are people using 2.2 on production and/or desktop computers. I
| know some of them. Many people jumped from 2.2 to 2.4 because of USB, but
| since it was backported into 2.2.18, many people prefered to stick to 2.2.

I still have a 2.0.30 machine, not network connected, does what I want.
| 
| > As for "much faster," let's say that I don't see that on any apples to
| > apples benchmark. If you measure new threading against 2.4 threading
| > there is a significant gain, but for anything else the gains just don't
| > seem to warrant a "much" and there are some regressions shown in other
| > people's data.
| 
| I second this. I've already tested several 2.5 and 2.6-test, and I'm
| really deceived by the scheduler. It looks a lot more as a hack to
| satisfy xmms users than something usable. I'm doing 'ls -ltr' all the
| day in directories filled with 2000 files, and it takes ages to complete.
| I'm even at the point to which I add a "|tail" to make things go faster.

Just tried that, test11 seems better behaved. I've been running Nick's
patches, for general use they work better for me, I can stand a skip a
few times a day.
| 
| For instance, time typically reports 0.03u, 0.03s, 2.8 real. It seems as
| each line sent to xterm consumes one full clock tick doing nothing. I
| never reported it yet because I don't have time to investigate, and it
| seems more important that people don't hear skips in xmms while compiling
| their kernel with "make -j 256" on a 16 MB machine. Second test : launch
| 10 times : xterm -e "find /" & and look how some windows freeze for up
| to 10 seconds... I don't think this is a problem right now. We've seen
| lots of work in the scheduler area, many people proposing theirs, and
| this will stabilize once 2.6 is out and people start to describe what
| they really do with it and what they feel.
| 
| Don't take me wrong, I don't want to whine nor offend anyone here. I
| think that Ingo and other people like Con have done a very great job
| at optimizing this scheduler. I just wish we could choose one depending
| on what we want to do with it.

It has been proposed, but people more influentional than I, that
scheduling be a module with some base doorknob scheduler as default if
not better scheduler is chosen.
-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.