Hello,

please CC: replies to me as I am not subscribed to the list.

> The real problem with this patch is that if a real time task yields, the
> patch will cause the scheduler to pick a lower priority task or a
> SCHED_OTHER task.  This one is not so easy to solve.  You want to scan
> the run_list in the proper order so that the real time task will be the
> last pick at its priority.  Problem is, the pre load with the prev task
> is out of order.  You might try: http://rtsched.sourceforge.net/

No it's not a problem at all, since RR tasks will just be moved to the end of
the queue and no SCHED_YIELD flag is set for them => no lower-priority task may
be scheduled.

However, I found a bug in my own patch :-)
The problem is that when a process yields and no process has a timeslice left,
recalc is called. But then we lose YIELD flag once again. So the simple
solution (and hopefully this time right :-) was to NOT clear YIELD flag at all
before exit from schedule() and move test for this flag from goodness_prev() to
goodness() function (getting rid of goodness_prev() altogether).

However, one of my tests still show strange behavior, so maybe you will get 3rd
version of the patch :-) Anyway, I got good 30% performance boost for
high-contention case in user-space spinlocks when sched_yield() is working
right.

Another function that would be very interesting is possibility to give up our
timeslice to specific other process. This way I could transfer control to other
process/thread that owns the lock directly so that process/thread may finish
working with the lock. This can again speed up everything. When I have now 4
processes contending for a lock, I get performance 1x. However, when there are
20 processes contending, performance is only 0.7x. I suppose this is due to
excessive context switches. I will try to implement something like
"sched_switchto" to switch to specific pid (from user space) and see if that
helps. Or is there such a function already?

Ivan Schreter
is@zapwerk.com