[ANNOUNCE][RFC] PlugSched-6.1.6 for 2.6.15-rc5 and 2.6.15-rc5-mm2

[Peter Williams <pwil3058@bigpond.net.au>]

This version features a major gutting of the SPA based schedulers to 
reduce overhead.  The inclusion of the mechanisms for gathering and 
displaying accrued scheduling statistics have been made a compile time 
configurable option (default is exclusion) as they are not an integral 
part of the scheduler and were mainly there to help with tuning.  In a 
future version they will be removed completely.

Additionally, the mechanism for auto detection and preferential 
treatment of media streamers in the spa_ws scheduler has been made a 
compile time option (default is exclusion).  The reason for this is that 
my testing shows that the performance of media streamers on spa_ws is 
adequate without it.  This will also be removed in a future version 
unless requested otherwise.

A patch for 2.6.15-rc5 is available at:

<http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/cpuse/plugsched-6.1.6-for-2.6.15-rc5.patch?download>

and a patch for 2.6.15-rc5-mm2 is available at:

<http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/cpuse/plugsched-6.1.6-for-2.6.15-rc5-mm2.patch?download>

Very Brief Documentation:

You can select a default scheduler at kernel build time.  If you wish to
boot with a scheduler other than the default it can be selected at boot
time by adding:

cpusched=<scheduler>

to the boot command line where <scheduler> is one of: ingosched,
nicksched, staircase, spa_no_frills, spa_ws, spa_svr or zaphod.  If you
don't change the default when you build the kernel the default scheduler
will be ingosched (which is the normal scheduler).

The scheduler in force on a running system can be determined by the
contents of:

/proc/scheduler

Control parameters for the scheduler can be read/set via files in:

/sys/cpusched/<scheduler>/

Peter
-- 
Peter Williams                                   pwil3058@bigpond.net.au

"Learning, n. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious."
  -- Ambrose Bierce