Re: [PATCH] mm: yield during swap prefetching

Zan Lynx
2006-03-08T23:48:28Z

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On Thu, 2006-03-09 at 10:00 +1100, Con Kolivas wrote:
> Zan Lynx writes:
[snip]
> > Games and real-time go together like they were made for each other.
>
> I guess every single well working windows game since the dawn of time is
> some sort of anomaly then.

Yes, those Windows games are anomalies that rely on the OS scheduling
them AS IF they were real-time, but without actually claiming that
priority.

Because these games just assume they own the whole system and aren't
explicitly telling the OS about their real-time requirements, the OS has
to guess instead and can get it wrong, especially when hardware
capabilities advance in ways that force changes to the task scheduler
(multi-core, hyper-threading). And you said it yourself, many old games
don't work well on dual-core systems.

I think your effort to improve the guessing is a good idea, and
thanks.

Just don't dismiss the idea that games do have real-time requirements
and if they did things correctly, games would explicitly specify those
requirements.
--
Zan Lynx <zlynx@acm.org>

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