Re: must-fix list for 2.6.0

Andrew Morton
2003-04-30T23:11:58Z

Rick Lindsley <ricklind@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Why is this bad?
> (a) if it does busy looping through sched_yield it will eat cycles which
> might not have happened

Things like OpenOffice _do_ busy loop on sched_yield(). It appears with
that patch, OO will sit there chewing ~1% of CPU. Not great, but not bad
either..

A few kernels ago, OpenOffice would take sixty seconds to just flop down a
menu if there was a kernel build happening at the same time. That is just
utterly broken, so if we're going to leave the sched.c code as-is then we
*require* that all applications be updated to not spin on sched_yield.

There's just no question about that. It may end up not being acceptable.

Has anyone looked at what Andrea did in -aa? I assume some suitable
compromise was achieved there.