Re: [Announce] [patch] Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler [CFS]

Bill Huey
2007-04-16T05:36:52Z

On Sun, Apr 15, 2007 at 09:25:07AM -0700, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> Now this doesn't mean that people shouldn't be nice to each other, not
> cooperate or steal credits, but I don't get the impression that that is
> happening here. Ingo is taking part in the discussion with a counter
> proposal for discussion *on the mailing list*. What more do you want??

Con should have been CCed from the first moment this was put into motion
to limit the perception of exclusion. That was mistake number one and big
time failures to understand this dynamic. After it was Con's idea. Why
the hell he was excluded from Ingo's development process is baffling to
me and him (most likely).

He put int a lot of effort into SDL and his experiences with scheduling
should still be seriously considered in this development process even if
he doesn't write a single line of code from this moment on.

What should have happened is that our very busy associate at RH by the
name of Ingo Molnar should have leverage more of Con's and Bill's work
and use them as a proxy for his own ideas. They would have loved to have
contributed more and our very busy Ingo Molnar would have gotten a lot
of his work and ideas implemented without him even opening a single
source file for editting. They would have happily done this work for
Ingo. Ingo could have been used for something else more important like
making KVM less of a freaking ugly hack and we all would have benefitted
from this.

He could have been working on SystemTap so that you stop losing accounts
to Sun and Solaris 10's Dtrace. He could have been working with Riel to
fix your butt ugly page scanning problem causing horrible contention via
the Clock/Pro algorithm, etc... He could have been fixing the ugly futex
rwsem mapping problem that's killing -rt and anything that uses Posix
threads. He could have created a userspace thread control block (TCB)
with Mr. Drepper so that we can turn off preemption in userspace
(userspace per CPU local storage) and implement a very quick non-kernel
crossing implementation of priority ceilings (userspace check for priority
and flags at preempt_schedule() in the TCB) so that our -rt Posix API
doesn't suck donkey shit... Need I say more ?

As programmers like Ingo get spread more thinly, he needs super smart
folks like Bill Irwin and Con to help him out and learn to resist NIH
folk's stuff out of some weird fear. When this happens, folks like Ingo
must learn to "facilitate" development in addition to implementing it
with those kind of folks.

This takes time and practice to entrust folks to do things for him.
Ingo is the best method of getting new Linux kernel ideas and communicate
them to Linus. His value goes beyond just just code and is often the
biggest hammer we have in the Linux community to get stuff into the
kernel. "Facilitation" of others is something that solo programmers must
need when groups like the Linux kernel get larger and large every year.

Understand ? Are we in embarrassing agreement here ?

bill