Re: [ANNOUNCE] BFS CPU scheduler version 0.420 AKA "Smoking" for linux kernel 3.3.0

[Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>]

On Tue, 2012-03-27 at 09:30 +1100, Con Kolivas wrote: 
> On 26 March 2012 00:37, Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de> wrote:
> > Yeah.  In all the interactivity testing I've ever done, it's really hard
> > to not see what you expect and/or hope to see.  For normal desktop use,
> > I don't see any real difference with BFS vs CFS unless I load test of
> > course, and that can go either way, depending on the load.
> >
> > Example:
> >
> > 3.3.0-bfs vs 3.3.0-cfs - identical config
> >
> > Q6600 desktop box doing a measured interactivity test.
> >
> > time mplayer BigBuckBunny-DivXPlusHD.mkv, with massive_intr 8 as competition
> >
> > no bg load real    9m56.627s              1.000
> > CFS        real    9m59.199s              1.004
> > BFS        real    12m8.166s              1.220
> >
> > As you can see, neither scheduler can run that perfectly on my box, as
> > the load needs a tad more than its fair share.  However, the Interactive
> > Experience was far better in CFS in this case due to it being more fair.
> > In BFS, the interactive tasks (mplayer/Xorg) could not get their fair
> > share, causing interactivity to measurably suffer.
> 
> massive_intr runs a number of threads that each run for 8ms and then
> sleep for 1ms. That means they are 89% cpu bound. Run 8 of them and
> your CPU load is 88.8 * 8 = 7.1. So now you're testing a difficult
> mplayer benchmark in the presence of a load of 7.1 on a CPU with 4
> cores. I don't know how much CPU the playback of your particular video
> is but I suspect it does require a fair amount of CPU based on the CPU
> it got back in your test. I can virtually guarantee that the amount of
> CPU BFS is giving to mplayer is proportional to how much CPU is left.
> Ergo as far as I can see, BFS is likely being absolutely perfectly
> fair. This sort of fairness equation has been already elucidated in
> the pHD that I linked to in my original post and he has done a much
> more thorough analysis than this kind of drive-by test that you're
> doing and misinterpreting has already shown that BFS is fair to a
> fault.
> 
> snip the rest
> 
> 'top' snapshots are uninteresting because CFS and BFS report cpu time
> completely differently and a single snapshot tells us nothing.
> 
> Snip uninteresting-to-desktop-user throughput benchmarks.

You accuse others of disinterest in their dirty underwear, and wave away
the wide skid marks in your own with a flick of the wrist.  Amazing.

-Mike