Re: interactive task starvation

Peter Williams
2006-03-21T22:51:06Z

Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 13:59 +0100, Willy Tarreau wrote:
>
>>On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 01:07:58PM +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote:
>
>
>>>I can make the knobs compile time so we don't see random behavior
>>>reports, but I don't think they can be totally eliminated. Would that
>>>be sufficient?
>>>
>>>If so, the numbers as delivered should be fine for desktop boxen I
>>>think. People who are building custom kernels can bend to fit as
>>>always.
>>
>>That would suit me perfectly. I think I would set them both to zero.
>>It's not clear to me what workload they can help, it seems that they
>>try to allow a sometimes unfair scheduling.
>
>
> Correct. Massively unfair scheduling is what interactivity requires.
>

Selective unfairness not massive unfairness is what's required. The
hard part is automating the selectiveness especially when there are
three quite different types of task that need special treatment: 1) the
X server, 2) normal interactive tasks and 3) media streamers; each of
which has different behavioural characteristics. A single mechanism
that classifies all of these as "interactive" will unfortunately catch a
lot of tasks that don't belong to any one of these types.

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

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