Re: [PATCH] mm: yield during swap prefetching

Con Kolivas
2006-03-08T02:30:29Z

On Wed, 8 Mar 2006 01:27 pm, Lee Revell wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 13:22 +1100, Con Kolivas wrote:
> > > How is the scheduler supposed to know to penalize a kernel compile
> > > taking 100% CPU but not a game using 100% CPU?
> >
> > Because being a serious desktop operating system that we are
> > (bwahahahaha) means the user should not have special privileges to run
> > something as simple as a game. Games should not need special scheduling
> > classes. We can always use 'nice' for a compile though. Real time audio
> > is a completely different world to this.
>
> Actually recent distros like the upcoming Ubuntu Dapper support the new
> RLIMIT_NICE and RLIMIT_RTPRIO so this would Just Work without any
> special privileges (well, not root anyway - you'd have to put the user
> in the right group and add one line to /etc/security/limits.conf).
>
> I think OSX also uses special scheduling classes for stuff with RT
> constraints.
>
> The only barrier I see is that games aren't specifically written to take
> advantage of RT scheduling because historically it's only been available
> to root.

Well as I said in my previous reply, games should _not_ need special
scheduling classes. They are not written in a real time smart way and they do
not have any realtime constraints or requirements.

Cheers,
Con