Re: [2.4.17/18pre] VM and swap - it's really unusable

Nigel Gamble
2002-01-11T02:48:26Z

On Thu, 10 Jan 2002, Alan Cox wrote:
> The fun below 1mS comes from
>
> 1. APM bios calls where the bios decides to take >1mS to have
> a chat with your batteries
> 2. Video cards pulling borderline legal PCI tricks to get
> better benchmarketing by stalling the entire bus

Don't forget the embedded space, where the hardware vendor can ensure
that their hardware is well-behaved. Even on a PC, it is possible for
someone who cares about realtime to spec a reasonable system.

On good hardware, we can easily do much better than 1ms latency with a
preemptible kernel and a spinlock cleanup. I don't think the
limitations of some PC hardware should limit our goals for Linux.

Nigel Gamble nigel@nrg.org
Mountain View, CA, USA. http://www.nrg.org/