Re: Ingo Molnar and Con Kolivas 2.6 scheduler patches

[Timothy Miller <miller@techsource.com>]

Daniel Phillips wrote:

> 
> In the meantime, the SCHED_SOFTRR proposal provides a way of closely 
> approximating the above behaviour without being intrusive or 
> application-specific.
> 


And there are obvious benefits to keeping things application-general.

IF it's possible to intelligently determine interactivity and other such 
things, and lots of impressive progress is being made in that area, then 
that is definately preferable.  But there may be some circumstances 
where we simply cannot determine need from application behavior.

It might help to have an API for real-time processes that is accessible 
by non-root tasks.  If a task sets itself to real-time, its scheduling 
is more predictable, but it gets a shorter timeslice (perhaps) so that 
being real-time doesn't adversely impact the system when abused.

The nice thing about the smart schedulers is that (a) no one has to 
change their apps (although they can tweak to cooperate better), and (b) 
future apps will behave well without us having to anticipate anything.