Re: [REPORT] cfs-v4 vs sd-0.44

[Willy Tarreau <w@1wt.eu>]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 06:53:47PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> * Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> 
> > It would be even better to simply have the rule:
> >  - child gets almost no points at startup
> >  - but when a parent does a "waitpid()" call and blocks, it will spread 
> >    out its points to the childred (the "vfork()" blocking is another case 
> >    that is really the same).
> > 
> > This is a very special kind of "priority inversion" logic: you give 
> > higher priority to the things you wait for. Not because of holding any 
> > locks, but simply because a blockign waitpid really is a damn big hint 
> > that "ok, the child now works for the parent".
> 
> yeah. One problem i can see with the implementation of this though is 
> that shells typically do nonspecific waits - for example bash does this 
> on a simple 'ls' command:
> 
>   21310 clone(child_stack=0,  ...) = 21399
>   ...
>   21399 execve("/bin/ls", 
>   ...
>   21310 waitpid(-1, <unfinished ...>
> 
> the PID is -1 so we dont actually know which task we are waiting for. We 
> could use the first entry from the p->children list, but that looks too 
> specific of a hack to me. It should catch most of the 
> synchronous-helper-task cases though.

The last one should be more appropriate IMHO. If you waitpid(), it's very
likely that you're waiting for the result of the very last fork().

Willy