Re: My end user testing of 2.4.8-ish kernels

[Andrew Morton <akpm@zip.com.au>]

J Sloan wrote:
> 
> I did some testing today on the mini-low-latency patch.
> 
> I must admit that I was totally biased towards it from the start.
> 
> While it certainly didn't hurt anything, the bottom line is that
> after hours of mp3/dbench tests, I was unable to quantify any real
> difference between 2.4.18-pre3 vanilla and with mini low latency.
> They exhibit pretty much the same behaviour in terms of how much
> dbench it takes to start hearing audio dropouts in xmms - they were
> both smooth up to dbench 40, but started exhibiting sporadic audio
> dropouts at dbench 64.

Oh well.   I must have missed one.

> Out of curiosity I booted up 2.4.18pre2-aa2 and found it a real gem.
> To my pleasant suprise I was able to run dbench 128 without hearing
> a _single_ audio dropout. (the dbench 128 result was 19.75 MB/sec)
> 
> With dbench 192 I did start to hear some occasional dropouts, but
> they were generally short, e.g. 100ms or so.
> 
> In any event, all the 2.4.18-pre-ish kernels I tested today are much
> better at this than e.g. 2.4.7 - at least on my hardware, I am now
> getting excellent interactive performance under load without preempt
> or low-latency patches, and that's a good thing.
> 
> IMHO the -aa kernel seems to the clear winner here -
> 

the -aa kernel basically includes everything that's in the mini-ll
patch.  If you merge -aa, you get mini-ll.  Plus the one I missed :)

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