Re: [PATCH] self tuning scheduler

[Jim Houston <jim.houston@attbi.com>]

Hi Mike

I made a bit of progress on understanding the irman problem with 
my scheduler change.  When I run irman and top, the processes end
up with priorities like:

	irman parent	36
	irman child	21
	process_child	31-33   (group of 9 processes)

Since I expanded the range of priorities (to 0-79) these are quite
favorable priorities.  They are all have MAX_SLEEP_AVG bonus
equivelent of nice +10.

It's a priority inversion problem.  The irman child is waiting for
a read.  The process_child processes are happly running as a group
at approximately the same priority.  The irman parent is starved
because it is at a lower priority.  It is at a lower priority because
it uses more cpu on each pass.  It is doing the gettimeofday calls
while the child only does the pipe read & write.  The parent gets
an occasional boost from the fairness_update() code so it doesn't 
totally starve.

I'm contemplating making synchronous wakeups share the run_avg between
the processes so that groups of cooperating processes would clump
at the same priority.

I also wonder about trying to detect cycles of synchronous wakeups.
It seems that a group of processes passing a token should be treated as
compute bound.

I'm still playing with the "make -j 30".  I can adjust the priority
range where I start enforcing interactive behavior.  I may wire it
into the rq->prio_avg.  I assume that you can tolerate a bit more
timing jitter when doing a "make -j 30".

Jim Houston - Concurrent Computer Corp.