Re: Ingo Molnar and Con Kolivas 2.6 scheduler patches

[George Anzinger <george@mvista.com>]

Rob Landley wrote:
> On Saturday 09 August 2003 16:52, George Anzinger wrote:
> 
>>Ed Sweetman wrote:
>>
>>>the problem is you want a process that works like it was run on a single
>>>tasking OS on an operating system that is built from the ground up to be
>>> a multi-user multi-tasking OS
> 
> 
> Considering the multi-tasking OS has 1000 times the CPU power, memory, and 
> disk space as the single-tasking OS did when it debuted, yet still loses to 
> it in some areas, isn't it at least worth looking at?
> 
> 
>>>and you want both to work perfectly at peak performance
> 
> 
> We're pondering various heuristics with which to to improve the situation and 
> you say we're persuing perfection.  From heuristics.
> 
> Do you say these sort of things to the virtual memory people?  (Since you 
> can't do it perfectly, why bother to swap at all?  The perfect being the 
> enemy of the good, and all that.)
> 
> 
>>>and you want it to know when you want which to work at
>>>peak performance automatically.
> 
> 
> I know for a fact that automatic determination of interactivity is possible.  
> In OS/2 you could speed up a compile by  moving the mouse pointer over its 
> window repeatedly to give it extra clock ticks.  (So far we've managed to 
> avoid anything quite so disgusting in Linux, but there exist OSes where it 
> was done.  Having the keyboard and mouse and display be local devices is 
> actually the common case.  It took X about ten years to finally start 
> optimizing for the common case on the output side with MIT shared memory 
> extensions and such...)
> 
> The scheduler actually has a lot of information to work with.  Ingo's patches 
> strive to give it more information, and and Con's patches make much better 
> use of that information.  This is a good thing.
> 
> 
>>Well said :)
> 
> 
> Actually, I didn't really consider that list of straw man arguments to be 
> worth commenting on the first time around.  (I thought he was being 
> sarcastic...)

Well, I think he was too, but I am trying to say (as I think you are 
too) that it is not far from being a realistic goal.

As to timing, I just changed ISPs and was off line for a few days...
> 

-- 
George Anzinger   george@mvista.com
High-res-timers:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/high-res-timers/
Preemption patch: http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rml