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

Nick Piggin
2007-04-17T07:23:22Z

On Tue, Apr 17, 2007 at 12:09:49AM -0700, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>
> The trouble with thorough testing right now is that no one agrees on
> what the tests should be and a number of the testcases are not in great
> shape. An agreed-upon set of testcases for basic correctness should be
> devised and the implementations of those testcases need to be
> maintainable code and the tests set up for automated testing and
> changing their parameters without recompiling via command-line options.
>
> Once there's a standard regression test suite for correctness, one
> needs to be devised for performance, including interactive performance.
> The primary difficulty I see along these lines is finding a way to
> automate tests of graphics and input device response performance. Others,
> like how deterministically priorities are respected over progressively
> smaller time intervals and noninteractive workload performance are
> nowhere near as difficult to arrange and in many cases already exist.
> Just reuse SDET, AIM7/AIM9, OAST, contest, interbench, et al.

Definitely. It would be really good if we could have interactivity
regression tests too (see my earlier wishful email). The problem
with a lot of the scripted interactivity tests I see is that they
don't really capture the complexities of the interactions between,
say, an interactive X session. Others just go straight for trying
to exploit the design by making lots of high priority processes
runnablel at once. This just provides an unrealistic decoy and you
end up trying to tune for the wrong thing.